Nov 15 movie: Rabbit Proof Fence. For most of last century, official policy in Australia was to forcibly remove "half-caste" (i.e. white/aboriginal) children from their homes and raise them in education camps. This movie is based on a true story about three girls escaping from a camp in 1931 and walking 1200 miles back to their home town. The title refers to a fence stretching across almost the entire continent, which the girls follow to find their way home.
Rabbit Proof Fence was adored by critics, though Georg and I felt like it was too heavy handed and preachy. I guess it must be difficult to make a movie about such an appalling historical event without preaching at least a little. Kenneth Branaugh played Mr. Neville, the architect of the program that put the children in camps. It would seem to me that though Neville's actions were evil, at the time he must have thought he was doing good. But as Georg said, you could practically see Branaugh twirling his moustache (and he didn't even have a moustache). It would have been more interesting to find out why Neville thought it would improve the children's lives to take them from their families.
Lucky for me I was dozing on the couch when Georg put the movie on, so I missed the first half hour or so. Apparently I slept through the worst parts, like a scene where they measure the children's skin color to determine which will be mainstreamed into white society and which will be trained into the servant class. I woke up when the three girls had just run away, so the part I saw was mostly a road movie about the girls on their own, walking across a staggeringly beautiful landscape while evading the police and an aboriginal tracker hot on their heels.
To the movie's credit, I will say that Georg and I each predicted some horribly cliched stuff at the end which did not come to pass. Also, the acting by the girls was very good. And finally, I was glad to learn more about this historical episode. I had heard about it before, but only in vague terms.
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