Rabbit-Proof Fence

Jigalong was a depot on the longest fence in the world, a dusty, fly-blown place which was home to the half-caste children Molly Pilkington, her sister Gracie and their cousin Daisy - until white officers came, stole them away from their mothers and deposited them 1,200 miles away in an orphanage in Moore River. Here they were to be groomed for domestic service, brought to Christianity, and prepared for marriage to whites. It was the Chief Protector's zealous conviction that the aborigine must be bred out of them. He reckoned without the determination of a 14-year-old girl. A rare movie that justifies the kind of bombastic rhetoric you hear on trailers and ads, Noyce imbues a very simple true story from the 1930s with the force of anger and emotion. It's impossible not to be moved as the three young girls make their break for freedom and set off on foot for home, with only the fence to guide them. Well acted and evocatively scored by Peter Gabriel, the film's single strongest asset must be Christopher Doyle's photography, which renders the girls' odyssey a stark, elemental trek across a vast horizon.