Self-defense turns deadly, spurring a man to flee into the Australian Outback in this enthralling period drama from director Warwick Thornton. Based on true events, the film tells the story of Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris), an Aboriginal stockman living and working on the land of a preacher (played by Sam Neil) in the settler territories of Northern Australia in 1929. As luck would have it, Sam is accosted by a drunken war vet, and, in the chaos, kills the man in self-defense. Sam is certain that the justice of the settlers will not be in his favor, so he and his wife Lizzie escape into the Outback. Close behind are Sergeant Fletcher and his band, including an Aboriginal tracker named Archie, posing threats from which Sam may eventually run out of places to hide.
Director Biography
Australian-born filmmaker Warwick Thornton first feature-film was Samson and Delilah (’09), which earned him the Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or prize. Thornton is an alumnus of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, having majored in cinematography. He is an accomplished cinematographer and is known for short films Green Bush (’05) and Nana (’07).
Press
"Spare, deliberately paced, and almost Biblical in its search for moral justice in a harsh and lawless landscape." - Entertainment Weekly
"Around this spare story...director Warwick Thornton constructs a searing indictment of frontier racism as remarkable for its sonic restraint as its visual expansiveness." - New York Times
"A bleak story presented with great style, it's a finely made Australian western that demonstrates the malleability of that most American of genres as well as the impressive gifts of Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton." - Los Angeles Times
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