The film Samson and Delilah, released in the UK this Friday, has been acclaimed as the best – and the future – of Australian film-making: a film of ‘delicate simplicity and gut-wrenching power.’

The film depicts an Aboriginal community in the Central Australian desert where two teenagers, Samson and Delilah, live.

Very little seems to happen in their day to day lives. There is a palpable listlessness, a lot of sitting around on fences and wandering aimlessly along the red roads, kicking up dust. The flies buzz, the crickets chirrup, a band plays loud repetitive music from a verandah. And Samson sniffs petrol.

There is a feeling that the collective spirit of this indigenous community has been ground down to such a degree that to grind it down further in solvent abuse matters little.

Petrol sniffing has become a crutch in Samson’s life and his gateway to oblivion: the opening scene shows him reaching for his petrol can on waking. The rest of his time is spent in watching the quiet, serious Delilah. He follows her around, graffittis his clumsy feelings for her on the wall of a shop ( ‘S4D onley [sic] ones [sic]‘) and throws rocks at her in an attempt to express what he is unable to say in words: that he loves her.

Delilah, in turn, spends her days ignoring Samson. She watches her grandmother paint and pushes her to and from the health clinic in a wheelchair. (In real life, the woman who plays ‘Nana’, the grandmother, is both Delilah’s real grandmother and an Aboriginal artist). It is only when Delilah secretly watches Samson dancing in the dark that her feelings for him are stirred. When Nana dies, Delilah is attacked with sticks by relatives who accuse her, unfairly, of neglect.

Frightened, and left unsupported in their community, Samson and Delilah steal a car and run away to Alice Springs, where they sleep rough under a roadside bridge, shoplifting and accepting food from an alcoholic homeless man, Gonzo (who is the film director’s brother in real life). Their lives descend quickly into further misery.

The film, says director Warwick Thornton, is a story about love and its redemptive powers. But it is also a brilliant, bleak and unflinching film about the assaulted spirit of Australia’s indigenous peoples.

After the Europeans arrived in Australia, Aboriginal peoples had their lands stolen from them or destroyed. The initial invasions sparked such huge waves of disease that thousands died, and many others were massacred. In just over 100 years from the first invasion, their numbers were reduced from an estimated one million, to only 60,000.

In fact until 1992, Aboriginal land was still considered ‘terra nullius’ – land belonging to no-one – a legal clause that allowed it to be legitimately stolen from the people who had first occupied their homelands 60 – 65,000 years ago.

The appalling impacts on Australia’s indigenous people from years of atrocities continue to reverberate today: Aborigines today have a far higher infant mortality rate, suicide rate and a lower life expectancy than the rest of the population. They also make up a disproportionate number of the prison population.

Although the story of Samson and Delilah is one of Australian aboriginals, it is a similar tale for tribal peoples the world over, from the Innu of Canada to the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Penan of Borneo. When a people are robbed of their homelands, their ways of life, their languages, their myths and their memories, they are robbed of everything that gives their lives meaning and purpose. In short, they lose much of what makes them human.

The consequences of such thefts are as destructive as the contents of Samson’s petrol can: unemployment, social disintegration, depression, chronic disease, addictions and suicide are common. As Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson said, ‘When you take an Aboriginal man from his land, you take him from the spirit that is giving him life. You end up with shells of human beings, living in other people’s countries.’

This sense of disconnection, of living in other peoples’ countries is portrayed acutely in the film’s scenes in downtown Alice Springs, where Samson and Delilah are outsiders, looking in on a world brimming with happy lives that are not theirs – white teenage girls eating ice-creams, white families eating in cafes – in a country that once was theirs. The city scenes portray the fact that when tribal peoples are separated from their ancestral lands or prevented from using them in accordance with their traditions, a profound sense of alienation ensues.

Later in the film, however, there is a break in the clouds of bleakness. As they are being driven away from Alice Springs by a good samaritan, Samson watches the sun sink low over the desert’s plains; Delilah rests her head on his shoulder. A feeling of kindness and hope pervades, as if they might just be driving towards a better future.

The silent love of the teenagers has been cemented through their mutual suffering. Tragically, tribal peoples the world over also share their alienation and suffering; most today are amongst the most vulnerable and oppressed peoples on earth. But there is a relatively simple solution to their suffering: if tribal land rights are respected and upheld, and if tribal peoples are allowed the freedom and space to determine their own lives, stories such as Samson and Delilah’s could be very different.

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