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Low on schmaltz and with three terrific performances from the girls, this is a moving and fascinating look at a piece of recent history that most Australians would probably prefer to forget.

Source: Empire Magazine

Coventry News
Rabbit Proof Fence

By David Freak

7 November 2002 - The Story: Western Australia 1931, in a small hamlet on the edge of the Gibson Desert, mixed-race Aborginal girls Molly, her sister Daisy and their cousin Gracie are ripped away from their family under the orders of Perth based Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, Mr AO Neville (Branagh).

Neville - nicknamed 'The Devil' by the children - believes that the answer to the "coloured problem" is to breed out Aborginal race by taking "half-caste" children - such as Molly, Gracie and Daisy, who were fathered by long gone white fence workers by turning them into domestic servants and farm hands for white households, and preventing them from marrying Aborginal men.

Removed from their remote home, alongside a mammoth rabbit-proof fence which divides the region, the girls are re-housed in the grim Moore River Native Settlement where they are forbidden to speak their native tongue and re-educated by strict nuns who punish any rebellion.

But homesick Molly decides they must escape, and leads the youngsters out into the wild to begin a 1,200 mile journey home.

Meanwhile Neville has his top tracker and the police out looking for the runaways...

The Verdict: The girl's incredible trek is a remarkable episode from a grim period in Australia's recent history (Aboriginal children continued to be removed from their families under government policy until 1971).

Avoiding sentimentality, the film could do with a little more tension or drama, but the three girls give convincing and honest performances which belie their lack of professional acting training.

And the film is given extra weight due to the fact that it's based on Molly's own story (written by her daughter).

Rabbit Proof Fence is a sad, tragic tale which draws you slowly in, and keeps you watching.

Note: The first Rabbit Proof Fence was completed in Australia in 1907 to attempt to stem the destructive path of wild rabbits. It was the longest unbroken fence in the world.

Source: Coventry News

The Scotsman
Rabbit-Proof Fence (18)

Alistair Harkness

17 August 2002 - Rabbit-Proof Fence explores a disturbing part of Australian history: the government-sanctioned practice of removing half-caste Aboriginal children from their families and forcibly integrating them into white society.

Set in 1931, it is based on the true story of three young girls, removed from their family by the director of the programme AO Neville (Kenneth Branagh), who managed to escape from a specialised mission and journey 1,200 miles back home following the rabbit-proof fence that streches the length of the country. It’s a remarkable story, but sadly an unremarkable film.

The script never illuminates anything because virtually every line of dialogue is exposition. Thus every time we cut to Neville, all we get is Branagh updating us on how long the girls have been missing. We learn nothing about Neville, the man. He’s a monstrous figure but the film conveys this by having the kids refer to him as The Devil. But he comes across as little more than a plot device.

Only David Gulpilil is more than one-dimentional, playing Moodo, the Aboroginal tracker hired to find the girls. You can sense his reluctance to help, but Neville has him in a bind since his daughter is interned at the institution from which the girls have just escaped. He is fantastic and so are the young leads (Everlyn Sampi, Laura Monaghan and Tianna Sansbury).

The problems are mainly down to Noyce’s direction. For a film about such a daring and dangerous journey there is a surprising lack of tension, which is odd given that his break-through film, Dead Calm was such a nerve-shredder. But then you remember that he’s spent the last few years in Hollywood churning out asinine blockbusters like Patriot Games and The Saint.

He’s a bit too reverential towards his subject matter, a little afraid to take any dramatic licence, and it does a disservice to this movie because the real trauma is never efectively conveyed.

The film’s most moving sequence is not actually part of the film but some video footage of the 84-year-old Molly that Noyce tacks on to the end.

When Molly’s voice-over reveals that her own three-year-old daughter was snatched by Neville, never to be seen again, it sums up the sad, horrific nature of the story far more eloquently than anything in the previous 90 minutes.

Dominion, tomorrow 7:15pm, Glasgow Film Theatre, 21 August, 6:30pm

Source: The Scotsman

kamera.co.uk
Rabbit-Proof Fence

Reviewed by Nicci Tucker

"This is a true story - the story of me..."

Thus starts the voiceover in Rabbit-Proof Fence. This is the story of the journey of Molly, her younger sister Daisy and her cousin Gracie, three Aboriginal 'half-caste' children, forcibly removed from their tribal home by Western Australian authorities during the 1930s to a holding centre for integration into white society 'for their own good'. The films tells the story of the girls' 12,000-mile walk back to their mothers.

Based on the biography Follow The Rabbit-Proof Fence by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington Garimara, the film's director, Phillip Noyce, has described the film's subject matter as spiritual genocide. For this is a representative story of the Stolen Generations, a human-rights violation that only came to light in the mid-1990s, acknowledgement of which is still being denied by some. The fact that Molly, now in her 80s, on viewing the film suggested that this was not her story has added fuel to the deniers' fire down under (they are, of course, ignoring Aboriginal distrust of reproductive images). But around the world, people want to know about these missing years - in the UK, for example, since winning the Audience Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival, the film is being released on a wider print run than originally intended.

The titular fence is the longest in the world - 15,000 miles long, running the length of Australia from North to South, built to keep rabbits on one side and pastureland on the other. The biggest irony lies in this central motif, because it was the fence's construction that brought the childrens' white fathers to the previous isolated Aboriginal communities in the first place. Throughout the film, the girls are pictured as frightened rabbits trapped on the wrong side of the fence - wide-eyed as if caught in headlights, caged in a hutch transporting them away to the settlement, huddled like baby rabbits on the Bush floor. An interesting observation, no doubt to reflect Aboriginal history, is how the rabbit-proof fence is so effective in banishing rabbits that the only sight of one is a dead one. Screenwriter Christine Olsen says, "the fence has always been such an amazing symbol for the Europeans' attempt to tame the land: to draw a line … it's such a magnificent symbol for a lot of what's happened to Australia." Cultural dichotomies abound - black vs. white, women vs. men, Aboriginal 'jabba' vs. the English language, tradition vs. modernisation - but for the student of post-colonial landscapes, there is reassurance in the girls' attempts to manipulate the borders. They use the fence to get home - "just because people use Neolithic tools, Inspector, does not mean they have Neolithic minds" says Mr. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), the misguided bureaucrat responsible for the 'resettlement' program. In a particularly moving movement, the fence is touched by mother and child simultaneously, as a means of calling each other. In spite of all his strategic planning, 'white man' has not counted on this natural instinct. In outwitting the authorities, for example when Molly knows to make their escape in the rain as it will cover their tracks, the Aboriginal girls temporarily reclaim their land.

Australian-born director Noyce understands his land, helped by expert cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In The Mood For Love, 2000), and uses it to great effect in mirroring the emotional storyline. Sounds of the Bush and the freshness of water-soaked trees offer hope when the girls first escape, severely contrasted with the subsequent arid desert when it seems they are too tired to finish their journey. The vastness of the outback and the girls' daunting trip is highlighted by the opening aerial shots, and additional overhead shots confirm their tininess against the fence. Most effective is the sense of drama in accompanying the girls on their journey, albeit in a conventional narrative format of highs and lows. We follow the girls' progress along the rabbit-proof fence intercut with Neville looking at his maps, we feel as trapped as Molly does in point-of-view shots at the camp, and we consider the miles to travel as the camera lingers for a while on the terrain ahead. In these ways, the film has a very epic feel, not only in its production values - the Peter Gabriel soundtrack combined with Aboriginal spirituals seems deliberately emotive - but also understood in the classic sense of a hero overcoming the odds on a grand scale. It is perhaps for this universality, undeniably strong in the prevalent mother-daughter bond - "They told us we had no mothers. I knew they were wrong" - that a Hollywood director came home to tell an indigenous tale. Something barely known outside Australia has now touched an international audience.

The shocking revelation at the end of the film that re-education continued into the 1970s can only begin to explain the dislocation that Aborigines still feel today, reflected in their high levels of unemployment and alcohol abuse. Doris is pleased that her mother's/Mothers' story has finally been told (made more poignant knowing that she, too, was taken away). The global interest in the film has helped finance her new project in Molly's home town of Jigalong, next to the rabbit-proof fence - a Stolen Generations research centre, where tourists and indigenous people can journey for a different re-education.

Source:

Glasgow Evening News
Rabbit-Proof Fence (PG)

Angus Wolfe Murray

Aussie director Philip Noyce who made must-miss thrillers The Saint and The Bone Collector, goes back to basics with this examination of white Australia’s shameful attitude towards its native population. And it’s as if Hollywood had never dazzled lights in his eyes.

Based on a true story, the film has a simplicity that burns through the sole of cynicism. This is cruelty, tied to high-minded ideals - the worst kind.

In the Thirties, the government passed a law for the protection of Aboriginess, which meant that half-caste children could be forcefully taken from their mothers and given to white families, who would provide a "better" life.

Although racist to its core, the law was designed to "protect the natives against themselves" and offer a privileged alternative to those who would otherwise have had to live like bush rats.

There was also the matter of "the unwanted third race", which, it was believed, could be bred out in three generations. The unwanted third race was the half-caste and what needed to be bred out was "black blood".

Molly and little Daisy and their cousin Gracie were taken and transported in a cage on a train 1200 miles to the Moore River Native Settlement, where they would live in bare dormitories and be assessed for future adoption.