Samson and Delilah - 24 January 2010

Principal cast: Rowan McNamara, Marissa Gibson, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson

Film notes: Not to be confused with the DeMille biblical extravaganza of 1949, this is the first feature film of Aboriginal director, screen writer, and cinematographer, Warwick Thornton: here, Samson and Delilah are indigenous teenagers living in a Central Australian community, and the film’s beauty is subdued, tender, tense. Any biblical allusion is for viewers to discover. Samson is a petrol sniffer, who is courting Delilah silently, boyishly, while Delilah keeps contented company with her grandmother, the settlement’s traditional painter. Community dynamics—some humorous, some harsh—are necessarily part of the picture. With the death of Delilah’s grandmother, the tentative romance is pushed into flight from the community’s brutality and toward a fringe existence in Alice Springs.

This is, in essence, a love story in a landscape, a landscape alive with humanity in the Aboriginal way. It’s an unconventional love story that moves through a social reality always testing the young protagonists, individually and as a couple. “In its unhurried way, this is a passage through fire” (NZ Listener). For the director, it’s a love story that puts the very survival of its “untouchable” lovers into doubt, but it’s a story of hope.

Samson and Delilah is being hailed as one of the most extraordinary films ever made in Australia. It won the 2009 Caméra D’Or at Cannes, for best first feature film.