The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

New South Wales, 1900. Jimmie Blacksmith has a white father and an Aboriginal mother. Raised by a missionary and taught to believe he can make a place for himself in white society, he builds fences, works properly and marries a white woman. He is not paid, promises are not kept, and every door closes. Eventually he picks up an axe. Fred Schepisi directs and wrote the screenplay, from Thomas Keneally's novel, which is itself based on a real case, the killings committed by Jimmy Governor in 1900. Tommy Lewis plays Jimmie. He was not a professional actor; Schepisi found him at an airport and cast him. The film's strength is that it does not explain the violence and does not conceal its cause either. Every humiliation Jimmie is subjected to is shown one at a time in the first half; when the violence comes the film neither justifies it nor makes it unintelligible. It counts among the most important films of the Australian New Wave and is cited as a turning point in the country's reckoning with its own history. It competed at Cannes in 1978. Schepisi went to Hollywood afterwards and made entirely different films, among them Roxanne and Six Degrees of Separation. Who it is for: viewers who like Australian cinema and films that confront colonial history. Who it is not for: the violence is genuinely brutal, the deaths of women and children are shown directly, and the film offers no relief.