Cinema
Backlash
Bill Bennett · 1986
Synopsis
Two police officers, Trevor Darling and Nikki Iceton, are assigned to escort Kath, a young Aboriginal woman, to the outback of New South Wales, where she is to stand trial. On the way, the three of them find themselves stranded in the desert, far from any help, and this unexpected confinement creates a bond between the prisoner and her two guards that nothing could have foreseen.
Context
The director wrote a twenty-seven-page breakdown without dialogue, and the performers, David Argue, Gia Carides and Lydia Miller, improvised their lines on the spot; he wanted to give back to the actors a power that Australian cinema denied them. The budget, of 200,000 or 225,000 dollars, came first from a documentary commission from the BBC and the ABC, taken over afterwards by another financer. Selected at Cannes in the Un certain regard section in 1986, the film was bought by an American distributor who wanted to change its ending; the director spent legal fees to restore his own.
Who it is for
A film in English from Australia, with improvised dialogue, shot on a very small budget.
Prizes and reception
Two prizes at the Cognac crime film festival in 1987; according to its author, his most profitable film relative to its cost.