“A great love story, almost without words” about troubled young love in Alice Springs, directed by australian aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thorntonwas awarded the prize for best first feature at the Cannes Festival 2009.
“Thank you for believing in our first-born baby,” Thornton said as he accepted the award. “I don’t don’t know what to say. Viva Cannes, viva le cinema.”
“It’s 4am in Alice Springs where the actors come from and neither Marissa nor Rowan have phones,” he said.
“Someone will have to drive to their community, knock on the door and say ‘we won’!”
Thornton said his life had been a Cinderella story, with cinema as his fairy godmother.
“I grew up on the streets of Alice Springs, getting into trouble with the police. I needed direction and somehow I found cinema, or cinema found that direction for me. It saved my life.”
“I’ve got so many more stories to tell, what I believe are beautiful stories, that are fires inside me that I desperately need to show the world.”
It was not initially easy, he said, to find the beauty in a story of dereliction.
“The original story came out of anger at the neglect of our children, not only by the government and wider society, but even by parents. So it came from a dark place. I had to think about it for a year in order to present something that wasn’t angry, where people could just go on a journey
with these children.”
