Sydney - Not since Cathy Freeman won a gold medal at Sydney's 2000 Olympics have Australia's indigenous people had so much to cheer about. Samson & Delilah, in which director Warwick Thornton cast fellow Aborigines in leading roles, won Best Feature Film at last week's Asia Pacific Screen Awards.
It also topped its class in Cannes earlier in the year and is the nation's official entry for Best Foreign Film at the coming Academy Awards.
Not bad for a movie that cost just over 1 million US dollars to make and in which the director also wrote the script and was the cinematographer.
Samson & Delilah is the story of a teenage petrol-sniffer and his sometime girlfriend who leave their Outback communities to live rough in Alice Springs, the troubled capital of what the tourist brochures call the Red Centre.
They almost die before leaving and setting up home together in an abandoned house away from both the horror of Alice Springs and the squalor of the settlements where they were brought up.
Life for Aborigines in central Australia is often nasty, brutish and short. Getting past adolescence to adulthood, often means negotiating alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence and an inertia that alternately expresses itself in hopelessness and rage.
Rather than offer light relief, or romanticize life in remote settlements, Thornton offers an authenticity that is both shocking and inspirational. Yet it is not depressing.
"What I see is a truly moving and touching love story," veteran actor Jack Thomson said of Thornton's first feature film. "He has such an eye for the simplicity of telling a story and, in a film with practically no dialogue, you walk away from it deeply moved."
The sparse dialogue is partly explained by Thornton's decision to cast non-actors, Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson, as the young lovers. He chose them because, sadly, they were familiar with the material and would be telling what were effectively their stories in their own few words.
Thornton said his film gave Aborigines a chance to tell it like it really is.
"To create and promote this sort of stuff and to give people access to their stories and then to talk about themselves would be a fantastic thing," he said. "They have stories and they need those stories to be told, not only by 40-year-old men like me, but to tell their own stories."
The verisimilitude in the film is sometimes alarming: Thornton's older brother, a recovering alcoholic who lived rough in the dried up river bed that runs through Alice Springs, plays an alcoholic living in that same river bed. And McNamara, whose character, Samson, sees shoplifting as a hobby, faced court for breaking into a liquor store just before shooting began.
Sacha Molitorisz, film reviewer with The Sydney Morning Herald, said the film "zings with veracity" and sees genius in the director's decision not to give the audience - or, indeed, McNamara and Gibson - a rundown on how the lovers were living before they start their story.
"Thornton doesn't bother filling these two non-actors with the backstories of their characters," Molitorisz said. "Like Thornton, they have lived or witnessed everything in the script."
McNamara was the first to be auditioned for the role of Samson and Thornton knew he was taking a big risk casting him. He wandered off when he got tired of filming and had to be coaxed to keep going.
Gibson, whose assurance is in counterpoint to McNamara's flakiness, helped keep her screen lover on track.
Samson & Delilah is the first Australian feature to be nominated for Best Feature at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. South Korea's Gina Kim, who was on the judging panel, said it had the "integrity of the filmmaker - the passion and the sincerity of it is really beyond comparison."
