Sweet Country
Inspired by real events, SWEET COUNTRY is a period western set in 1929 in the outback of the Northern Territory, Australia.
Warwick Thornton follows up his uncompromising Caméra d’Or winning debut SAMSON AND DELILAH with an expansive film of great cinematic scope and vision. It’s 1929 and segregationist policies weigh heavy in Australia’s Northern Territory. Cattle-herder Sam is sent with his wife and niece to work for newly-arrived station owner Harry March. But where Sam’s religious boss treats them respectfully, March is institutionally racist, unhinged and abusive. When March goes on a booze-fuelled rampage, an altercation occurs and Sam shoots him in self-defence. Anticipating that frontier ‘justice’ will prevail, Sam and wife Lizzie go on the run. The local sergeant sets off in hot pursuit, leading a posse of landowners and aided by Aboriginal tracker Archie. Heightening the overall sense of dread and unease with a series of hallucinatory flash-forwards that reveal horrors yet to come, Thornton brings a vital Indigenous perspective and a striking visual imagination to this potent epic. (source: British Film Institute)