Unfinished Sky (2007)An Outback farmer takes in an Afghani woman who has fled from a brothel. Director:Peter Duncan |
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Unfinished Sky (2007)An Outback farmer takes in an Afghani woman who has fled from a brothel. Director:Peter Duncan |
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| Cast overview: | |||
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William McInnes | ... | |
| Monic Hendrickx | ... | ||
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Milo | ... | |
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Bille Brown | ... | |
| Christopher Sommers | ... | ||
| David Field | ... | ||
| Sam Cotton | ... | ||
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Christina Anderson | ... |
Supermarket Shopper
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Renai Caruso | ... | |
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Zulaikha Deen | ... | |
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Scott McRae | ... |
Policeman #1
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| Roy Billing | ... | ||
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Mercia Deane-Johns | ... | |
| Philippa Coulthard | ... |
Rose
(as Philippa Couthard)
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Hannah Cocker | ... | |
Honest Australian Outback sheep-farmer John Woldring leads an isolated life. Suddenly an exotic women turns up at night, armed and frightened out of her wits. He takes her in, grumpily resists her romantic overtures but allows her to become his housekeeper. Gradually he finds out she's an Afghan refugee, looking for other illegally emigrated relatives. He tries to help her quest, but they soon experience the human traffickers are on her track, and better connected then John could guess. Written by KGF Vissers
This film demonstrates how fragile film aesthetics are. Quite possibly as a novel, which takes time to read and allows us to accommodate shifts in our emotions, it could be fine. But here we have, essentially two conflicting stories that are jammed onto one another with destructive results.
One story is a tough, indeed brutal, issues movie dealing with justice, male dominance and humanist sentiments, the other is a touching romance about two vulnerable people trying to heal each other from their emotional scars. Neither of these is very original and the one, in my view, emotionally precludes the other. When we are steamed up about injustice, we cannot access the very fine-tuned emotions associated with love.
One of the greatest things about the film medium is its ability to twist time and integrate the past into the present. But here, that is the film's undoing. If the story had been told chronologically, we would at least have been able to get the nastiness out of the way and empathise with the romance, but the threat and extremely crude depictions of the 'horrors of the brothel' keep bursting back in, destroying any subtle emotions that have been generated.