Samson and Delilah

A remote Aboriginal community in Central Australia. Samson passes his time sniffing petrol and barely speaks. Delilah looks after her grandmother and tries to sell the paintings she makes. When the grandmother dies Delilah is blamed and beaten. The two of them steal a car and go to Alice Springs, where things are worse. Warwick Thornton wrote, directed and shot it, in his first feature. Rowan McNamara plays Samson and Marissa Gibson plays Delilah; neither is a professional actor. The clearest choice is language. There is almost no dialogue; across the whole film the two say a handful of sentences to each other and the narrative proceeds entirely through behaviour. It is not a stylistic game but the actual condition of two people who do not communicate. The subject is hard: substance dependence, violence, homelessness, and how the art market exploits Aboriginal painters. The grandmother's paintings sell in a gallery for thousands while the family is paid a fraction, and the film shows that in one scene and explains nothing. It won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes in 2009 and became Australia's Oscar submission. Thornton is Kaytetye and shot the film in the country he grew up in. Who it is for: viewers who can take Australian Indigenous cinema and hard social drama. Who it is not for: it is genuinely difficult; violence, addiction and sexual assault are shown directly and the film offers no consolation anywhere.