Three screen pieces today (one movie and two serials). Very different, but all linked.

The first is Rolf De Heer’s 2002 film The Tracker, set in 1922, and starring David Gulpilil.

This is, as Roger Ebert says, a haunting movie. It features four men, who are hunting a fifth, an Aboriginal accused of killing a white woman, across the beautiful but severe landscape of South Australia.

None of the characters has a name. Rather, they have designations. They are, therefore, not rounded characters, but types. 

The Fanatic (the policeman who leads the mission), is hard to stomach, and you think: "Surely this is over-stated; surely no-one could ever be as stupidly bigoted as this." But then you remember: "Actually, some people did -- and do -- talk like this..." That's the tragedy. The Fanatic believes implicitly in the colonial mission, and does not hesitate to kill innocent Aboriginals in order to "send a message".

The Veteran has been drafted into the team. He stays apart from the violence. He doesn't approve of it. But he doesn't do anything to stop it either. The Veteran represents many of us, I fear...

The Follower is young and inexperienced. He starts by imitating the Fanatic's cruelty. But the slaughter of manifestly innocent people makes him question the way this is all working out. When he challenges the Tracker's skills, and is shown the hardly observable minutiae they draw on, he apologizes. And eventually he finds the courage to resist.

The Tracker is wily. Metaphorically as well as literally, he picks his way carefully, measuring up the other characters' strengths and weaknesses, and planning his  moves accordingly. Having seen the injustice of the way white men live, he has no faith in the justice they mete out. He suffers (he is forced to wear a neck shackle at one point), but he also resists. And eventually he passes judgement and/or enacts punishment (firstly on the Fanatic, and then on the Accused, who is not guilty of the crime the white men accuse him of, but is guilty of another crime).


Adelaide and nearby, 2008-10. The world of the Indigenous Kaurna people changed irrevocably with successive waves of European explorers, whalers/sealers, and finally colonists





A useful commentary by Sarah Pinto points out that the movie came out at a time of controversy in Australia, following a series of broadly focused, public, and highly politicized debates about the country's history. Whereas the 1997 Bringing Them Home report (on the "stolen generations") was uncompromising in its conclusion that the longstanding practice of removing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families constituted an act of genocide, and recommended an official apology, the federal government questioned the findings, and rejected the idea of apologizing. "The Tracker can clearly be situated within the guilty contexts of Australia's so-called sorry debates, along with the wider context of the question of what to do with the history of colonisation," says Pinto.

The film, she argues, engages with the idea of guilt in two different ways. On the one hand, in the shape of the Fanatic, it symbolically ascribes political and criminal guilt to a particular manifestation of the white colonialist. The Tracker sentences him, and carries out the execution: "You are charged with the murder of innocent people. How do you plead? ... On behalf of my people, and all people, I am your judge and jury. I find you guilty as charged." But the song we hear the next day at sunrise suggests the need not only for justice but also for forgiveness: "You have taken my country... And I can never return, until there's contrition and we can all grieve my history."

On the other hand, the film shows, via the Follower's trajectory, that the acknowledgement of guilt and responsibility can be transformative. His apology to the Tracker is his turning point.

There are two interesting things to note about the cinematography.

Firstly, the worst of the violence is shown at one remove, by way of artwork (by Peter Coad). I liked this way of proceeding. We know exactly what is happening. We do not need to see the blood. As Ebert puts it: "Here is a film about memory, sadness, tragedy and distance, not a film that dramatizes what it laments." Romaine Morton, however, argues that this technique has the effect of removing the Indigenous victims, and directing our attention away from their suffering and towards the reactions of the white colonists.

Secondly, the soundtrack consists of a series of blues songs (written by Graham Tardiff and sung by Archie Roach). I valued the kind of social commentary this approach offered, but personally I find musical anachronism a little distracting. Morton, on the other hand, feels the music "substitutes for the voices of the silent Aboriginal characters".

Overall, Morton regrets the emphasis (again...) on the white characters: "The title of The Tracker suggests that it is the Aboriginal tracker who is central to the story, but instead, the film is more about how the white characters deal with their own sense of morality."

Pinto quotes others who feel the same. This is the kind of film, they suggest, that is explicitly anti-racist, but allows sympathetic audiences to substitute the horror and contrition they feel in the cinema for actual political action that might change things in society. Yet, given the context of the time, was it not better to at least open the way for people to feel that compassion, experience the power of an apology, and -- although the end of the movie is left ambivalent -- be able at least to hope for a way forward? I don't know.

Writing in 2019, Travis Akbar agrees with Ebert's characterization of "haunting": "From the perspective of an Indigenous man (me) that is exactly what it was. The history of Aboriginal people is something that is not talked about and to see it here in this film, from almost twenty years ago, was something I wasn’t expecting. It was very confronting at times... I am not alone in the way The Tracker made me feel; after a discussion with another First Nations man, Radio Producer and Artist Christopher Crebbin, we discovered we both had similar feelings. The Tracker is imposing, it is important, it is beautiful, but most of all, it is haunting."

That's not a bad note to end on.


Murray River, 2008



Sunshine, a 2017 Australian TV series, features a group of young men who hail originally from South Sudan, but now live in the Melbourne suburb featured in the title. A serious crime has taken place, and somehow these youths are involved, but they're reluctant to tell all they know, partly because they're concerned other (less important but still relevant) crimes will come to the surface, partly because they fear exposing others to the condemnation of family and society, and partly (mostly?) because they can't trust the police to deal with them fairly.

Backgrounding all this is the ambition of one of the lads, Jacob, to get a basketball scholarship to a US university. As the Sunshine Kings keep losing, his hopes of attracting a scout are fading. Enter the coach... Eddie, a misanthropic sports-shop owner, who is estranged from his wife and son, and whose own basketball career in the US clearly ended under a big, nasty cloud, agrees to train them. Eventually, we find out that he was the perpetrator of a horribly violent, blatantly racist episode that he has never truly owned and moved on from.

OK, so it's a little formulaic. Black kids are accused of something you're sure they can't have done, despite the piling up of suspicious circumstances. Eventually they're exonerated. The star basketball player makes it to his scholarship, even though the team doesn't win its final game. The coach eventually comes to the point where he can apologize to these young men for having been the person he was.

Despite this element of predictability, however, it's a good story, well told. And it's genuinely moving, because it asks real questions: What has to change before black kids can trust they'll get justice? How do you atone for something horrendous you have done? Is an apology enough?


Melbourne, 2007-10





The South Sudanese community is certainly one that needs a few breaks. There are roughly 20,000 people of Sudanese or South Sudanese origin in Australia. They often hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. While the problem is often blown out of proportion by the kind of media that thrive on stereotypes, it is also true that there are genuine problems that need to be tackled. Many struggle, through no fault of their own, to acquire a good education; many face unemployment; disproportionate numbers end up in gaol. And sadly, many deal daily with prejudice: "It's the colour of Machar Maler's skin that prompts supermarket staff to follow the Aussie teenager around grocery aisles..." Unsurprisingly, many deal with identity crises, and struggle with mental health. And the pandemic has done nothing to help a community whose financial vulnerability goes hand in hand with crowded living conditions and the need to work multiple jobs. 

Anthony LaPaglia, who plays Eddie, admits he knew little about the community he found himself working among. Asked whether he thought the series could help to offset the negative attention they have suffered, he responds, very realistically:  "Do I think it will be able to change people's minds? Yes, but my fear is that, if people have a proclivity to not want their minds changed, they're not going to watch it. But for others, it might shed a light in a way that's hugely helpful and positive."

Ez Eldin Deng acted as cultural consultant and liaison between the production team and the local community. He arrived in Australia from Egypt in 2004. (His mother plays the mother of the central character, Jacob.) As he puts it: "Our community, their hearts break, blood is flowing because we've been misrepresented in the media. Not every community has the same kinds of issues of trauma and loss. We have a problem with integrating, but no one will open the gate, it's always closed."

How sad is that...









And finally, a Spanish TV series, called Anti-Disturbios (Riot Police). Made in 2020, it is set in Madrid in the year 2016.

We follow a six-man intervention unit that is sent to supervise an eviction. They meet a large crowd, who offer passive but determined resistance. Although the team is undermanned and underequipped, the justice in charge of the case insists that the men proceed. In the resulting chaos, the youngest cop clearly loses his cool; somehow a young Senegalese immigrant, who lives on a different floor, falls to his death from the gallery; and someone has the bright idea of deleting the footage a witness has recorded on her phone.

The unit have to face up to an investigative team, a key member of which is Laia, a single-minded young woman determined to get to the truth. But that truth seems ever more elusive. She rapidly comes to the conclusion that there are bigger figures at work behind this eviction and others like it; meanwhile some of her superiors in the police force seem less than supportive of her efforts.


Madrid, 2020



When we first meet the riot squad, they come across as thoroughly unlikeable, radiating the most toxic brand of hyper-masculinity. As the story progresses, however, we see not only further evidence of misdemeanours, but also some of the problems that lie behind the tough image they put on like a vizor. There's something up with all of them. They can't deal with women. Or they're in constant physical pain. Or they're depressed. Or they're tied up with a corrupt uncle. Or they're just awfully young... 

Police unions have been very critical of the series. One former policeman complains: "After seeing the series twice, because with the first viewing I couldn't believe such stupidness, I thought: Where have I been working for 24 years? In which riot squad? Where do these characters come from? Cocaine addicts, joint-smokers, macho and violent people, fascists, drinkers..."

It's hard to deny, however, that the police have an image problem. Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen describes them as "hated and controversial", but also nuances the motivations behind the script: "We were interested in the story of the riot police but then we saw that these people are right at the bottom of the pile. And as we looked up above them we started writing about corrupt former police officers, about real estate corruption, about under-the-counter politics. And we realised that we wanted to tackle all that stuff."

There are certainly plenty of larger-than-life stories in Spain that could have served as inspiration...

And despite their many off-putting traits, you find yourself not entirely without sympathy for these six men. As they face protesting residents who do not know all the facts of the immigrant's death, or howling crowds of football supporters, it doesn't take much of a leap of the imagination to wonder "what would I have done?" and "would I have done any better?" And even while you're asking that, you're following the action, and thinking, "no, not that, don't do that, be bigger than that"... As my first-quoted review points out: "While the show goes all out to humanise its central sextet, it by no means offers an apologia for their attitudes, but neither does it serve up a facile condemnation of their worst traits."

In fact this series leaves viewers with many questions to ponder: How do you police in this age of gaps and dislocations? How do you stop the formation of groups that really have nothing to lose? How do you honour people who have risked everything to get to Europe, but who then die in banal accidents, fuelled by corruption?

My main beefs with the series were the sex-in-the-nightclub-toilet scene (utterly and completely pointless), and the tying up and gagging of Laia (cliche). No, of course, women aren't bullet-proof, but this was such a hackneyed set-piece that you wonder why they had to include it.

Otherwise, I'd rate it. Within the constraints of its genre, it was nuanced and thought-provoking.