'Set in 1825, Clare, a young Irish convict woman (Aisling Franciosi), chases a British officer (Sam Claflin) through the rugged Tasmanian wilderness, bent on revenge for a terrible act of violence he committed against her family. On the way she enlists the services of an Aboriginal tracker named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), who is also marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past.'
Source: Screen Australia.
'The seminal Australian film Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) opens with a sweeping, circular pan around a desert landscape. It begins in silence, briefly focussed on a small house next to a railway track, but the camera soon moves on, curving around to the right, taking in an unending dusty expanse of yellow earth and pale blue, cloud dappled sky in all directions. The disorienting pan of the desert, the awareness of temporality as the simple shot goes on, work to bodily involve the viewer. The stillness of the landscape, contrasted with the steady movement of the camera, creates a feeling of presence in the scene – the spectator’s gaze roves over the landscape, taking it in and experiencing the isolation and solitude as if they were standing in it. The familiarity of the ‘outback landscape’, an archetypal image of Australia, also stirs affective responses in the Australian spectator, reminding them of their ‘closeness’ to the film’s eerie locality. ‘This is who you are to the world’, the film seems to say. This closeness, combined with the camera work which positions the viewer ‘in’ the desert, renders this scene extremely bodily – the spectator is pushed against the landscape, invited to feel the heat and dry stillness of the outback, as well as the isolation, before any plot or characters are introduced. Thus, we are invited to experience the film sensorily before we engage with it cerebrally, aligning with the hopes of director Ted Kotcheff, who “wanted people to watch the film and be sweating”. (Introduction)
'This article takes as its point of departure the political work of the English novel in both accompanying and arguably catalysing the expansion of the public sphere in the 18th/19th centuries through the enfranchisement of an ever-expanding range of previously marginalized voices. The representation of first-person testimony was crucial to this achievement, enabling the novel genre to function as a paralegal petition for the pursuit of an ever more equitable polity. Taking as its point of departure novels which revisit criminal trials and scenes of testimonial reception preserved in the colonial archives, the article considers the representation of Indigenous characters in contemporary novels by non-Indigenous Tasmanian authors (including Richard Flanagan and Rohan Wilson) and argues for the ethical effectiveness of their formal choices. Despite the risks involved in the representation of Indigenous voice, these novels ask important questions about the English legal system and its transplantation to Australian shores.' (Publication abstract)
'Writer-director Jennifer Kent’s terrific first feature, The Babadook (2014), was a very superior horror movie set in Adelaide; her second, The Nightingale, which won two major prizes last year in Venice, is also a horror movie but, unlike its predecessor, the horror this time isn’t supernatural but all too real. Kent’s uncompromising approach to this story of colonial violence against women and Aborigines in Van Dieman’s Land in the early 19th century is pretty confronting at times. I’m sure she would argue that it had to be because, to tell this story — and it’s a story that demands to be told — there’s no hiding the fact that some terrible crimes were committed by the English colonisers.'(Introduction)
'Jennifer Kent imagines an epic journey in The Nightingale'
'Highly anticipated feature film, The Nightingale, which is likely to contain the most accurate depiction of Tasmanian Aborigines on the big screen to date, has been selected to premiere, in competition, at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival later this month.'
