Running time: 94 minutes
Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura Monaghan
Rating 8 out of 10
At a time when scenes of racial disharmony and hatred continue to clutter our televisions and newspapers, Rabbit-Proof Fence is a stark reminder of one of the most shameful periods in Australia's recent history. The film is set during the '30s, an era of political and social unrest when Aborigine children were forcibly taken from their parents, and placed with white families, who could apparently give the little ones a life and a future beyond their wildest dreams. Mixed race children, so-called "half-castes", were not so fortunate. They were moved to remote detention centres, where they could be monitored and assessed, and hopefully "purified" so as to be suitable for re-introduction to Australian society.
Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the harrowing yet life-affirming true story of Molly (Everlyn Sampi), Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and Gracie (Laura Monaghan), three little girls who were wrenched from their mothers, then taken some 1,500 miles away to the Moore River Native Settlement.
There, the children were scrutinised by nurses and doctors, and by the founder of the scheme, the infamous AO Neville (Kenneth Branagh), who believed segregation was the only way to ensure the survival of Australian society. In the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, Molly, Daisy and Gracie escaped from their captors, and walked all the way home, through the hundreds of miles of desert, with only their love for their mothers to keep them going.
The rabbit-proof fence, which stretched throughout the Outback, provided the girls with a useful guide from one state to the next.
Director Phillip Noyce has no need to embellish the story with flashy visuals or camerawork: Molly, Daisy and Gracie's astonishing journey speaks for itself. Inhospitable as they may be, the arid Australian desertscapes provide the film with a picturesque backdrop. The young cast are eminently watchable, particularly Sampi as the eldest of the girls, who tries to keep the trio together in the face of terrible dangers and personal sacrifice.
The ending packs an almighty emotional punch, likely to inspire anger and tears in equal measure.
