The Devil's Playground

Australia, 1953. Thirteen-year-old Tom Allen is at a Catholic seminary run on strict rules. The school is run by brothers and the aim is to raise the boys into clergy. Tom has reached adolescence and his body starts to clash with the school's rules. But the film does not look only at the boys; the brothers raising them are inside the same repression, and some of them cannot carry it. It is Fred Schepisi's first feature and rests largely on his own childhood; Schepisi too had spent time in a seminary as a boy. The film came out of the wave in which Australian cinema was reborn in the seventies and became one of the most argued-about works of that wave. Simon Burke plays Tom and was a child at the time. A hundred and seven minutes. The story indicts the institution but shows the brothers as human too, and does not look for an easy villain.