Film Festival 09 - Samson and Delilah
Samson & Delilah
Australia 2009, 101m
Director: Warwick Thornton
Festivals: Cannes (Un Certain Regard) 2009
Camera d'Or, Best First Film, Cannes Film Festival 2009
Warwick Thornton's potent, tacitly contentious feature about a pair
of outcast Aboriginal kids who flee from their tiny central
Australian community won the Camera d'Or for the Best First Film at
the Festival de Cannes in May. It's a major accolade, but the
chances are that it pales as a reward for Thornton and his
collaborators beside their film's success in the multiplexes of
Australia. Samson & Delilah has entered the national
conversation across the Tasman the way Once Were Warriors once did
here.
It's not the taut poetry of Thornton's sublimely visual narrative
style that people are talking about: it's violence and addiction in
Aboriginal communities, and how they limit the options of young
Samson and Delilah, two tender, uncertain kids whose spirits are
sustained by little more than their teasing, unadmitted love for
each other. (The lively mix of candour and shyness and mutual
incredulity in the two first-time actors is so fresh you forget
they are acting at all.) The frankness with which Thornton depicts
their descent into pariahdom in Alice Springs has a staunch
matter-of-fact humanity about it, a determination to stand by one's
own, that is both excruciating and stirring to behold. And though
you may spend long passages of this film dreading what's coming
next, Thornton always nurtures the hopefulness that allow us and
his young protagonists a chance at redemption. Unmissable. -
BG.
"Samson & Delilah looks and sounds (its sound design, both
playful and dissonant, is terrific) like no Australian film I've
seen. Timeless and also utterly contemporary, it will leave hearts
bruised, but aching with joy." - Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily
Telegraph
In Warlpiri and English, with English subtitles
