Customer Reviews

Rabbit-Proof Fence

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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.

Based on (part of) a true story, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" details the long journey that three young aboriginal girls embark on after being forcefully taken from their family in order to learn how to "fit into" a white society.

The story is fascinating, and the execution from director Phillip Noyce is stunning. This is a perfect film for history teachers to show their students. The performances are very natural and winning. Peter Gabriel's score is excellent - with the music playing over the closing credits being some of his best work ever (and appearing in a slightly different form as "Sky Blue" on his 2002 album, _UP_).

If you have seen this movie and enjoyed it, the DVD is a keeper. The audio commentary from Noyce is superbly done. In addition to giving the viewer background as to how and why he did the movie, he also offers up some interesting tidbits about the difference between working on mainstream films ("Clear & Present Danger," "Sliver," etc.) and smaller films like "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and "The Quiet American." A good documentary is included as well.

I won't gush on and on about the excellent movie. I want to bring your attention to the "Making of" documentary. So often these are thrown onto a DVD as a "bonus", but amount to nothing more than a refried re-telling of the film. Here, instead, we are treated to forty-five minutes of how Philip Noyce selected his three young actresses, and all the trials and tribulations that entailed. The scene in the film of the three children being taken from their mothers is a very heart-wrenching scene. But, moving beyond compare is that same scene as caught by the "making of" cameras during and after the shoot. Many of the people behind the cameras were in tears during the actual filming of the scene. At the end of the scene, the character mothers are on the ground crying and Noyce yells, "CUT!". He looks down and you can hear the actresses still crying. He looks up and around the camera with a puzzled look on his face to see if perhaps the actresses did not hear him yell, "CUT". They are all still on the ground sobbing, and he has to go over to console them, saying "Woa, Woa, Woa..." to calm them down and bring them out of it because everyone was so drawn into the event they were reenacting they forgot they were only filming a scene. That was very moving to see how the girls and women were so affected by the filming of that scene. Insights such as this are what make the "Making of" documentary actually worth watching after the film itself.

This is a marvelously successful movie that is especially moving because the story it tells is true. RABBIT-PROOF FENCE is the story of how Australia for several decades took half-caste aboriginal children (i.e., children of mixed white and aboriginal parentage) and raised them in what was essentially an orphanage school to become domestic servants. The film focuses on three girls--Molly, Daisy, and Gracie--who live beside one of Australia's rabbit-proof fences that cover the country and are taken from their mother to live at the school. The bulk of the movie tells of their escape and 1300 mile journey following the rabbit-proof fence back to their mother.

Three things stand out about this movie. First, the simplicity of the story. This is a movie that has easily identifiable good and bad guys. The policy the government embarked on for several decades was obviously and irredeemably racist and evil, and in part made more tragic by not being widely reported. I know a couple of Australians living here in Chicago, and both say they had never heard of this practice while growing up. This film does an enormous service to humankind by publicizing this great crime.

Second, the performances by the three girls in the central roles are marvelous. In particular, Everylyn Sampi, as Molly, the oldest of the three girls, stands out. What is remarkable is the three girls were utter amateurs, with no acting experience at all. Sampi manages to imbue her Molly with both great intelligence and iron-willed determination.

Third, the film is both a visual and aural delight. I have over the years seen a lot of films shot in Australia, most of them much further east than this one. Most of it occurs in areas of Australia that are less familiar. I saw this film in a theater with five-point sound, and I have rarely seen a film that made better use of that than this one.

This is one of those films that no fan of film should miss. It tells a magnificent and true story well. One of the most moving moments is when two of the real life girls, now elderly women, are shown. Just a great movie.

Rabbit-Proof Fence is an amazing movie based on a dark period in Australia's history. Half-caste children are taken from their Aborigine mothers and raised in camps, with the goal of helping them make the transition from their "primitive" lifestyle to the white world. Although the camps are not horrible, the fact that the children/families have no choice is.

3 girls defy the system and escape. Their plan is to follow the rabbit-proof fence (that's being/been built across Australia) to get back to their home - 1200 miles away! The girls range from 8 to 14 years old. They find some help along the way but it's primarily their will to get back home that gets them through. What makes this even more amazing is that it really happened! In fact, the 14 year old made the trip twice after being returned to the camp after her first successful escape.

The movie avoids preaching about the wrongness of the Aborigine Act but, instead, focuses on showing the various sides of the story - the whites who honestly feel that they are helping the children, the whites along the way who help the girls even knowing that they have escaped, the Aborigine tracker who can't seem to find the girls despite his skills, and, of course, the children and families impacted.

Rabbit-Proof Fence reminded me of the Railway Children in the US - another story that should be told!

This rather well made & enjoyable Australian film is billed as a true story. We are shown an individual, half-caste, Aborigine girl by the name of Molly Craig as she is forceably taken from her mother and thence to a place called Moore River to be brought up amongst whites. All the children at Moore River, we are led to believe, have similarly been remanded here for their own good and against their and/or their parents' will; the director all the while conveying the view that---in this manner---the Australian government went about trying to extiguish Aborigine culture, by removing half-caste (ie., those with one white parent) Aborigine children from their families to be brought up as white. The focus of this film concerns a young girl (named Molly) as she walks over a thousand miles back to her mother, after she escapes (with her 2 sisters) from Moore River. The guardian of that institution (played by Kenneth Branagh) is portrayed as one determined to locate these girls and have them forceably brought back for their own good. It's a remarkable story actually---the girl Molly did in fact walk over a thousand miles! back to her mother & home in the 1930s (by following a low "rabbit proof fence" through western Austalia. The real Molly Craig, when viewing this film, however, declared "This is not my story." She wasn't actually taken by force, for instance. Her step-father even consented to her being sent to Moore River. Moreover, the 1936 Royal Commission into treatment of Aborigines showed that 1,003 of Moore River's 1,067 children weren't "stolen" but voluntarily brought by their parents to get a schooling or be safe ; for their own good (as half-castes were sometimes harrassed and/or shunned by other Aborigines). Read all the details yourself from the Australian Civil Liberties Union at this address: (www.angelfire.com/folk/aclu/yr22.htm) To boot, the illiterate girl who portrayed Molly Craig in this film herself ran away from the making of this picture; not once, but twice! And after the film was completed she was then sent to boarding school by the director (yes she was brought back twice too, to complete the film) until she decared she didn't want to be there either; wanting simply to go home---a desire she was ultimately granted. The director declared that he was only trying to help her---notwithstanding the film's Kenneth Branagh character saying the same thing in the film while being presented as a racist. Mind you, I LIKED THE FILM. It was well shot. The children actors were very believable. The Australian landscapes involved herein were captured to great effect too. The problem is---after reading up on this for several hours on the internet---I know not what's true and what isn't concerning the story of Aborigines in Australia; except that the director of this film apparently took an awful lot of liberties with the story on which he based Rabbit Proof Fence. That the director had the audacity to put a photo of the real Molly Craig at the end of the film, too, inclines me to not recommend this film. But I won't go that far since I actually liked the film. Instead, let me suggest that you not take all you see and hear in this film as necessarily part of the notion that "This is a true story." And should you decide to give this film a try do at least have a look at the article I've indicated above. Thanks for reading my thoughts herein & I hope you take them in the spirit in which they were offered; honestly, I find it hard to understand why folks wouldn't want more information when it's rather pertinent, I think. (04Dec) Cheers!

In Australia prior to 1970, the law gave the "Chief Protector of the Aborigines" legal guardianship of all the Aborigine people and the power to forcibly remove half-white Aborigines from their homes and place them in schools where they would be educated in the ways of White society. In 1931, the "Chief Protector of the Aborigines" was a man named A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branaugh). "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is the story of three half-Aborigine girls whom Mr. Neville ordered removed from their mothers' care and the girls' courageous journey back home. Molly(Everlyn Sampi), who was the oldest at 14 years, her young sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), and their cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan) were placed far from their home in the "Moore River Native Settlement" for their education. This is the story of the girls' 9-week journey on foot, following Australia's continent-spanning rabbit-proof fence, to try to reach their home and family in northern Australia.

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is a true story, based on the book written by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington. This is a stunningly beautiful film in its portrayal of the Australian landscape and its native peoples. Thanks to the beautiful cinematography and the excellent performances, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is riveting all the way through even though the story of people trudging across a continent on foot offers little variation. Everlyn Sampi gives an outstanding performance as Molly, who is responsible for the fate of her young charges for the course of their arduous journey. Molly is a young woman of few words, but she speaks volumes with her eyes and is magnetic in her ability to fix the audience's attention on the screen. The other great performance is that of Kenneth Branaugh as A.O. Neville, the cause of all the girls' -and many other Aborigines'- troubles. It would have been very easy -but inaccurate, I think- to portray Neville as a horrible power-mongering bureaucrat. With relatively few scenes or dialogue, Branaugh effectively communicates that Neville's intentions were essentially good and that he took his responsibilities seriously. That said, the film does not shy away from demonstrating that his actions were misguided and ultimately very destructive to Australia's Aborigine people and to the nation's moral fabric. Highly recommended.

This movie is one of the greatest pieces of film-making I have ever seen. Philip Noyce's handling of the untrained young actors Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sainsbury and Laura Monoghan who played Molly, Daisy and Gracie respectively, and his light touch on the plot are truly spectacular. This film has an emotional intensity and an intimate scale which makes the grandstanding by other "socially conscious" film makers seem mawkish or banal by comparison. The performances of the actors is wonderful, especially Sampi and one hopes that this will be a turning point for three-dimensional aboriginal ensemble actors in motion pictures (although of course, this is Hollywood in action so any prospect of long-term social benefit has to be taken with an Uluru-sized grain of salt).

As a record of what happened during the 60 plus year period (1909  early 1970s) when the Australian government carried out its policy of forcible relocation of part-Aboriginal children in order to "lighten the race" into extinction, this film is devastating in its impact. Readers who are interested can get a pretty good introduction to the issues by going to the Rabbit Proof Fence website.

I'd like to add a couple of things here to the points that have already been made about the film. First of all, one of the strongest points of the movie is that the villains of the piece (in particular Kenneth Branagh's A. O. Neville) were totally convinced of the rightness of their cause and the subhumanity of Aboriginal people.

Writing in the early teens, one of Neville's fellow proponents of child removal wrote "I would not hesitate to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring." This same luminary noted that Aboriginal women were "prostitutes at heart" and that all Aboriginal people were "dirty, filthy [and] immoral". It should be pointed out that similar viewpoints were held towards the urban poor during this time period in all European countries, and their white colonies. Social Darwinist thinkers cast these groups along with Jews, Slavs, blacks, Asians and Natives of any kind as human trash to be eternal servants to the master race or victims of the march of progress.

Secondly, on top of the forcible destruction of aboriginal families, the film also raises the issue of the sexual exploitation of young aboriginal women by white men. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the movie for me was when Mavis (played by Deborah Mailman), a "graduate" of Neville's school who is the servant and sex slave of a white farming family begs the girls to stay with her: "If you're here, he won't come back".

Mavis represents the implicit fate of many of the young girls taken from their families. These young women were a convenient and powerless source of domestic labor for settler families to recreate the master-servant power dynamic that Australians had supposedly rejected. Interestingly, a similar fate awaited some of the British evacuee children who were sent to live in Australia during World War 2.

The last thing I want to note about the film is that the real Molly (shown with her sister at the end of the film) felt that the film should have been about the greater tragedy of her life: ten years after she escaped from Moore River, she was subsequently recaptured with her own two daughters, she managed to escape again with the younger one (Annabelle) but was forced to leave the other (Doris Pilkington Garimara, who became the author of the book on which the movie is based) behind. Molly did not see Doris again for 25 years. Annabelle was taken again when she was brought in for treatment for an eye infection a year later in 1942. To this day, 60 years later, Molly has received no contact from her youngest daughter.

The year is 1931 and many well meaning leaders of Australia's dominant white culture share the view of British Chief Protector of Aborigines A. O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh) that the Aborigine "in spite of himself, the native must be helped." Doris Pilkington in 1996 wrote "Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence" about the abduction of Molly (Everlyn Sampi), her younger sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and cousin Grace (Laura Monaghan) from their backward and illiterate surroundings. Their mother can offer them a loving home, but the government's educational facility can prepare them to participate more fully in the advanced world of the 20th Century. Director Phillip Noyce does not make the mistake and demonize Neville. The man's heart is truly in the right place. Neville is a racist who adheres to the pseudoscientific theories popular during that era. Surprisingly, his racism is not of the segregationist variety. Neville truly desires full integration of the Aborigine into Australian society. He realizes, quite accurately, that the future prospects of these children will dramatically improve if they become westernized. Regretfully, Neville fails to realize that he has no right to force assimilation upon these Aborigine families. The girls escape from the school and must travel over a thousand miles to return to the land of their ancestors. Neville will not rest until they are safely back in custody. The story revolves around their courageous high risk adventure in avoiding capture and surviving the brutal outback environment. The incredibly beautiful music of Peter Gabriel conveys the inner turmoil of both the benevolent dictators and their innocent and uncomprehending prey. Isn't some sort of compromise possible? Is there anyway of reaching a win-win result?

The new world is unrelentingly clashing with that of the old---and Western Civilization as defined by Matthew Arnold must ultimately prevail. The values of the West are nothing more than the championing of the best that has ever been said and written in human history. Race, ethnicity, and religion are not relevant factors. People of Caucasian pigmentation do not inherently have a monopoly on the truth. "Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence" is a beautiful film dealing with the awkward issues surrounding the assimilation of the uninitiated into Western society. We are reminded that the so-called natives still have rights that cannot be ruthlessly ignored. The imposition of the minimal values underpinning a viable social order is warranted. After that, only the process of political and social conversion is acceptable. There is also no reason whatsoever to abandon the valid traditions of the indigenous culture. I strongly recommend that everyone in your family sees this powerful and spellbinding movie. It might also behoove me to add that the previously mentioned author Doris Pilkington is is the daughter of Molly.

Phillip Noyce's "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is based on the true story of Daisy, Molly and Gracie, three half-caste children in Western Australia in 1931. The Australian government continued enforcing until 1970 a law that allowed mixed race children to be removed forcibly from their parents and sent to boarding schools to "educate" them for a white world. The girls were trained to be servants and domestics. The whole system was similar to the Indian schools in the United States, where First Nations children were sent to be raised as pious, productive, educated young adults, but the system there too frequently failed. The plan was that the half-caste girls would marry whites or other half-castes and have the Aboriginal "bred out of them," as policy director A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh) explains to a local ladies' society.

Daisy, Molly and Gracie are sent to the Moore River Native Settlement in Perth, over 2000 kilometres from their home in Jigalong Station. They do not last more than a few days before Molly, the ringleader, plans their escape through brush and desert, finding her way home by following the rabbit-proof fence, the longest in the world, that divides pasture from rabbit-infested bush. Neville and his men, including a skilled Aboriginal tracker, Moodoo (film veteran David Gulpilil) search for weeks in pursuit of the girls, and one is eventually recaptured in a harrowing scene, only steps from safety with the other girls.

There is very little in the way of dialogue, and although Noyce's child actors are all unskilled, there are remarkable performances and true moments of fear, desperation, and grief shine through. The girls' mother and grandmother are particularly effective at conveying the mind-shattering grief they must live with knowing that they may never see their girls again. In one touching scene, at separate points on the fence, thousands of kilometres apart, both the mother and the girls tightly grip the fence, lightly shaking it, as if they could feel the resulting vibrations and sense the others' presence there.

The cinematography shows off the dry palette of the desert, the spectacular desert sunsets, the shimmering wave of heat that covers the landscape. This film reminded me in some ways of the 1971 Australian film "Walkabout," which starred Gulpilil as an Aboriginal teenager, and follows two white children that are stranded in the outback with only Gulpilil as a guide. The "Rabbit-Proof Fence" score by Peter Gabriel is low-key and appropriately tension-filled, meditative and mysterious at key moments, with wisps of Aboriginal chant and song woven into a lush synth background, and reminded me of the excellent soundtrack to Australian sci-fi series "Ocean Girl" by Garry McDonald and Laurie Stone. The narration at the beginning and end of the movie was the most powerful for me: the real-life Molly and Daisy, now old women in bright clothes that are startlingly out of place against the backdrop of the outback they slowly walk through, tell how the story ended. And that was the saddest truth of all.

The included documentary "Following the Rabbit-Proof Fence" shows Noyce flying to remote outback communities looking for Aboriginal child actors, auditioning thousands of hopefuls before settling on the final three, Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, and Laura Monaghan, as well as the emotional journey for the temperamental star and the harrowing experience of filming the girls' abduction at the hands of a white officer. Pretty much the whole cast and crew was in tears and shaken afterwards, forced to relive the crucial moment that defined the "Stolen Generations:" the theft from their mothers' arms, some never to be seen or heard from again.

An excellent film that treats a little-known subject outside of Australia (and fairly unspoken within), with the fresh-faced innocence of children who beat the odds and found their way home across 2000 km of largely uninhabited, hostile terrain to the waiting arms of their family.