Rosalie's Journey

Female Aboriginals look back on their school years at St. Mary’s girls home. They do not appear on screen, either. We only hear their voices. We see old images of the school where they learned to speak English and live according to the white people’s customs, all dressed in the same garb. In the early 1950s European-Australian filmmaker Charles Chauvel visited Alice Springs in search of an aboriginal actress to play the lead role in his movie Jedda, opposite actor Robert Tudawall. At St Mary's he found Ngarla Kunoth. In the ensuing months and years Ngarla's life and sense of herself - her femininity and her aboriginality - changed profoundly. Rosalie (Ngarla) Kunoth-Monks speaks for the first time, in her first language (Arrente), about her life in Central Australia as a young woman and the profound cultural challenges she faced in playing a role imagined and written from afar. The filmmakers did not give it a thought, she observes. Recreating scenes that match remaining archival home movie footage, director/photographer Warwick Thornton has woven a moving portrait bringing forth memories and stories that have simmered quietly beneath the surface of one of the most acclaimed and controversial Australian feature films. Without taking a clear stand, Rosalie´s Journey shows how a dominant culture, whether or not knowingly, oppresses another culture and fails to appreciate the diversity and beauty of that culture. Which provides insight into a universal problem. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)