I am looking forward to seeing Samson and Delilah, not just because it deals with the topical issue of petrol sniffing in Aboriginal communities, but it also is directed by an Indigenous man.
- Director Warwick Thornton with Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson who are the main characters in the film.
NIT has a story on the movie in the next edition, which can be found online here.
Samson and Delilah is first and foremost a love story, but it is also an unflinching look at life in an Aboriginal community outside Alice Springs which is wracked by violence, substance abuse, poverty and boredom.
The film picked up the Audience Award at the Adelaide Film Festival, where it received a five-minute standing ovation, and it will open the Message Sticks Film Festival at the Sydney Opera House on May 7.
It releases nationally on May 8, and has already received the kind of glowing reviews that Baz Luhrmann’s Australia could only dream of.
Variety calls it “an engrossing and touching snapshot of an Australia too often left on the cutting-room floor”.
Samson and Delilah might be the most important Australian film to come out in years.
There are already many talented Aboriginal directors out there, and they are showcased every year in the Message Sticks festival.
But the films that seem to have the most success have been by non-Indigenous directors, like Phillip Noyce and Rolf de Heer.
Their films were amazing and timely and were stories that should be told. Ten Canoes and Rabbit Proof Fence are literally, Australian classics.
But there is something different an Indigenous director brings to the table, and although I don’t discount the contribution of non-Indigenous directors, Indigenous stories should largely be told through an Indigenous lens.
With the way critics are raving about Samson and Delilah, I have high hopes for Warwick Thornton. Here is his biography on the Samson and Delilah website:
Warwick has been waiting patiently for about 20 years to make a feature film since he first started hanging out at CAAMA Radio in Alice Springs in his teens.
Warwick was a teenage DJ at CAAMA and he used to watch the video unit vehicle drive off to exotic places and was forced to hear all the stories when they came back.When a media traineeship came up he jumped at the chance and hasn’t looked back. He learnt his trade of cinematography on the job and then went to AFTRS film school in Sydney for three years.
After graduating, he got bored of sitting around waiting for the phone to ring with work offers, so he decided to write some of his own ideas. His body of work includes short films Payback, Mimi, Green Bush and Nana. He has also directed and shot loads of documentaries including Rosalie’s Journey about the star of the film Jedda.
It’s a pretty amazing first feature film!Have a look at the trailer here. It is in Quicktime.
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