Rabbit-Proof Fence
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.04 You Save: $9.95 (66%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $4.24 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Canada
Movie Reviews of Rabbit-Proof Fence
Movie Review: Courage and determination during a dark chapter of history
Summary: 5 Stars
Between 1905 and 1971, the Australian government had a horrible policy. They forcibly removed all half-caste Aboriginal children to special training schools. The grown daughter of one of these children wrote a book about her mother's experiences. This film is an adaptation of that book. The story takes place in 1931, when Molly, then 14, her sister Daily, then 8, and her cousin Gracie, then 10, are literally torn from the arms of their mothers, put in a cage, and taken 1,200 miles away to a school which is actually a sort of prison. Here, they are forbidden to speak their own language, they have to attend a Christian church, and are taught the ways of the white Australian culture around them. Led by Molly, the girls run away. And most of the film is the odyssey of their trek back home, following the rabbit-proof fence that bisects Australia, constructed to keep rabbits out of the pastureland.
The villain is clearly the white director of the school. It is amazing, but he actually believes in the racial theories that were prevalent at the time. He believes he is helping them and plays his role well, coming across as stupid and misguided rather than evil. The Aboriginal girls are all unknowns, and terrific actresses, as are the women who play Molly and Daisy's mother and grandmother. The courage and determination of the girls during their three-month journey, the people they meet along the way, and their efforts to dodge the trackers who have been sent to retrieve them by the school, is truly inspiring. This is all set against the backdrop of the Australian outback; the cinematography certainly captures its beauty.
The film is 94 minutes long and moves quickly. I immediately identified with the girls and felt their fear as well as their bravery as they made their way across the Australian continent. In a postscript to the story, we learn more about their lives. It did not turn out to be pretty. But two of the girls have survived into their nineties, and we meet them briefly. They are strong women with weathered faces, one of them walking with a cane, but clearly at home in their Outback surroundings.
The film is a lesson in inspiration and courage as well as a geography and history lesson about Australia. I loved it and highly recommend it.
Movie Review: Rabbit- Proof Fence Review
Summary: 5 Stars
The movie Rabbit Proof Fence is about the Aborigines indigenous people in Australia. A man they call Mr. Neville ran an office that took Aborigines half- caste children from their families because of their mixed race. The main characters are three girls who are taken from their families at very young ages, to be taken to a camp where they are to learn proper manners and learn how speak English and pray. Molly, the oldest, is a very important role model for the other two girls because she is a little wiser and she has bravery enough for the three of them. The girls decide that they don't like it in the camp, so Molly finds an opportunity to escape. They ran and ran for miles and stopped along the way to get food from good people, and kept on going.
At one point, they ran across a man who told Gracie that her mother was in a different town, and that she could get to that town by train at the next stop. At first, Gracie believes Molly when she says that he is lying, and follows. Then a few minutes later, she turns around and starts to head for the train station. Molly and the youngest girl keep going along the Rabbit Proof Fence and eventually turn around to go look for Gracie. They find her sitting at the train station and just as she starts to walk toward the two girls, a car comes out of nowhere and takes her away. At the end of the movie, the remaining girls find their way home and are reunited with their families. After they grew up and had children, they were taken away again, along with the children, and she escaped and walked all the way home a second time. Mr. Neville was in control of the Aborigines kids in Australia until the 1970's.
I think this movie relates to world religions because it shows how punished the indigenous people were and how they weren't allowed to practice their own religions for a very long time. In some cases, as in this movie, they weren't even allowed to be with their families. Now, their culture suffers because there is no culture left. I think that indigenous people were treated horribly in the past, and since this didn't stop until the 1970's in Australia, there is no telling where else it is going on in the world.
Movie Review: Learn Something New About Racism and Fences
Summary: 5 Stars
It seems that wherever racism exists a fence threatens to be built even to this day. This film is just another example of the world's great racial divide and brings to light the much ignored history of Aboriginal people.
Director Phillip Noyce has created a simple movie with a huge impact. He used real Aboriginal actors and managed to get a mountain of emotion out of the eyes of the three young girls that the movie centers around, Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan. The story is based upon a true tale written by one of the central character's children. It begins happily with a beautiful family of Aborigines who exist in Australia during the 1930's, they live off the land in a peaceful existence until the white society decides that the "black" needs to be blended into the white race and eliminated, hints of Nazism invade here. Camps are set up and girls are captured to be trained and blended into the "supreme" white society without a care, almost as if they were merely cattle and not actual human beings.
The majority of the film is spent following the three girls through their escape from the camps and into the desert. It is adventurous, thrilling and often horribly sad. The girls encounter people along the way who see them as human and some help is offered through crusts of bread and warm coats. They follow a fence line to find their way back home and end up traveling for nine weeks and over about 1,500 miles. The ending is beautifully touching and well worth the adventure.
I learned something new from this film. I was never aware of what white society tried to do to the Aborigines, yet another horrid aspect of racism not taught in average schools. It seems that Australia committed atrocities towards the Aborigines well through the 1970's and possibly even to this day to some extent. While I am constantly disappointed by humanity and its constant desire to separate the races I was not disappointed in this film. It is a beautiful and heroic saga about the human spirit and the struggle for personal freedom. Let this fence topple all others with its important message.
Movie Review: Empathy
Summary: 5 Stars
There can be little question that, were the shoe on the other foot --that is, if the government of the United States or England decided to take away the children of an entire demographic, say the children of southern whites or of people living in one of England's numerous rust belt ex-cities of the sort that seem to give ingrown rise to skinheads and white supremacists-- we would be reading some very different views from the racists on the topics explored in Rabbit Proof Fence. Can you imagine your neighbor's two kids being being carted away by the local sheriff without a fight? It wouldn't happen. Yet some people keep posting reviews that urge common, decent folk, like you and your neighbors, to support the sort of policy depicted by Rabbit Proof Fence. Incredible.
As bleak as Rabbit Proof Fence is at times, the story is, as many here have noted, really one of hope, of the triumph of the human spirit. It is a beautiful demonstration of resisting and overcoming gross social injustice. THAT'S the LESSON of this film. And besides being a great adventure trek story in it's own right, the film stands as a reminder: the only thing necessary for something like this to happen again -- to any race, any place, any moment-- is for the human capacity for empathy and seeing things FROM the other person's life-vantage to pass away without resistance. THAT'S why the voices of haters and racists deserve not censorship, but simply to be drowned out-- smothered completely-- by the voices of reasonable people who HAVEN'T lost their ability to empathise and identify and feel compassion for people who aren't exactly like them. To haters, empathy is a mystical process. They don't get it, and they hate it because it poses THE central threat to their ability to induct the disenfranchied and gullible into their intellectually and emotionally stunted army of the Got-It-All-Wrong.
This film is great, and the DVD contains some very fine supporting material, in the form of the audio commentary and making-of documentary. It will make an absolutely superb addition to any library or school DVD collection. Five stars+.
Movie Review: Uncommon pluck in the Outback
Summary: 5 Stars
In RABBIT-PROOF FENCE, it's early 1930s Australia and A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh) is the government pencil-pusher empowered to "protect" the native aboriginals, part of which policy is to forcibly remove half-caste children from their native homes and send them to special schools where they can be "improved" by the ways and language of the whites. Rather than being a cruel or bad man, Neville is a well-intentioned and paternalistic bureaucrat whose working theory of racial superiority is at the benevolent end of the spectrum, the other end being the extermination camps of Hitler's Third Reich. As Neville puts it, "The native must be helped in spite of himself."Three children abducted from their home under this program are Molly (14), her sister Daisy (8), and cousin Gracie (10). They're transported to a school 1,200 miles away. Very soon after arriving, Molly decides to escape and walk back home. She convinces Daisy and Gracie to accompany her. The trek back is along the RABBIT-PROOF FENCE, a wire mesh barrier thousands of miles long stretching from the north to southern coasts of Western Australia, and which was designed to keep wild rabbits from devastating the crop lands.
The three aboriginal children who play the roles of Molly, Daisy and Gracie (Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, and Laura Monaghan respectively) are untrained actors, but you wouldn't know it by the performances they give. Molly is especially impressive as the one whose strength must keep her companions moving forward on the long march, as well as provide the cunning and skill to avoid both the roving constables on the lookout and the old aboriginal tracker, Moodoo (David Gulpilil), used by the school to hunt down runaways.
RABBIT-PROOF FENCE is based on a true story, a fact brought home to the audience by the film's last scene. It's an amazing and moving tribute to the pluck of three children determined to foil the foolish and insensitive policy of a misguided government. This film is not, and probably won't ever be, in wide release. Do yourself a favor and seek it out - and take the kids.