This movie has stuck with me the last two weeks. It is such an enthralling look into the dark and gritty British colonization of Australia. I've now read as many interviews as I can with Jennifer Kent, so I'm hoping that writing this will help me move on!Writer/director Jennifer Kent (The Babadook, 2014) spends the first hour of the movie absolutely demoralizing Clare (Aisling Francisosi) and you as a viewer (TW: there are multiple instances of brutal sexual & physical assault). Then the film dives into an examination of severe PTSD and how some cope with and react to their traumatic events.Extensive research was done by Jennifer Kent on the history of convicts in Australia and of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. She specifically chose Tasmania as her location. Known as 'hell on earth,' repeat offenders, rapists, murders and hardened criminals were sent here with overly severe punishments from Britain to strike fear into any criminals in the UK.Baykali Ganambarr, who played Billy, is an Aboriginal man forced to live on the outskirts of town, where Aboriginal bones and settlements have since been found dating as far back as 42,000 years ago. He was a beautiful voice for the horrifically oppressed and dehumanized treatment of the Aboriginal population.And don't forget the women! You can't have a new island without procreation! Britain ended up sending women to Tasmania who committed minor crimes to even the gender balance. Outnumbered eight to one, it must have been a perpetual nightmare to be a woman in Tasmania. I will let Jennifer Kent take us out, as she discusses the treatment of women in this time:"In the convict prison in Richmond, Tasmania, a plaque on the wall explains that women inmates were put in solitary confinement for three weeks straight - no light, freezing cold, on a sandstone floor with a hessian sack." explained Kent. "They were put in for talking back to their masters, or getting drunk, or other very minor crimes. They would be released after twenty-one days to go back to that same master, and they would deliberately commit another crime so that they could be put back into solitary confinement. That made me think: 'Why would a woman do that? What was so bad about that situation that they would prefer total deprivation?' The answer is rape, beatings, physical and psychological abuse."Thanks for reading!sources: uno, dosedit: put in imdb links via /r/movies https://ift.tt/3lwrv2I
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