It was most apropos to see this powerful film just a day after hearing Floyd Red Crow recount his experience of being taken from his home and forced to attend a mission boarding school here in the United States.

In Australia, the effort of cultural genocide through schooling was focused on "half-caste" children -- those born to an aboriginal and a European-descendent parent. Based on a true story, "Rabbit Proof Fence" focuses on the kidnapping of three girls from their loving mother and grandmother by a government-sanctioned boarding school. (In fact its head was appointed as "legal guardian for all half-cast children!) The girls, Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, are forced to live in cold, impersonal and inhumane conditions, where they were treated like chattel, forbidden to speak their native language, and over time would gradually be "assimilated." However, unlike other films that focus on the boarding school experience (such as the excellent Canadian film "Where the Spirit Lives"), Rabbit Proof Fence focuses on the girls attempt to escape home. To do so they must traverse 1200 miles of Australian bush and desert, all the while being tracked by the occasional police officer and an aboriginal "tracker" who is forcibly indebted to the boarding school.

The film does an effective job of conveying the twisted colonial mindset, personified A.O. Neville (the outback equivalent to General Pratt, famous for the U.S. boarding school slogan, "Kill the Indian, save the Man."). But to its credit, "Rabbit Proof Fence" the focus is on the girls and their incredible journey. The title is derived from the fence they try to follow home -- the largest fence in the world meant to keep rabbits out of farmland. (Similar to keeping aboriginal people out of their own land and culture.) The result is both moving and devastating.

The young actresses are wonderful. My only regret about the film is that the girls rarely spoke in the native aboriginal language. But like my friend pointed out, probably very few young people in the actresses' generation still know the language.

At the very end we meet (on screen) two of the girls as adults -- the real life Molly and Daisy, now quite elderly. Afterwards everyone in the theater stayed in their seats for long time and, although the theater was crowded, the lobby after was almost silent.

Everyone should see this movie.

Extra credit for my American Indian Lit Class!