The Fringe Dwellers | |
---|---|
Directed by | Bruce Beresford |
Written by | Bruce Beresford Rhoisin Beresford |
Produced by | Sue Milliken |
Starring | Kristina Nehm Justine Saunders Kylie Belling |
Cinematography | Donald McAlpine |
Edited by | Tim Wellburn |
Music by | George Dreyfus |
Release date |
|
Running time | 98 minutes |
Country | Australia |
Language | English |
Budget | A$1.26 million [1] |
Box office | $174,433 (Australia) |
The Fringe Dwellers is a 1986 film directed by Bruce Beresford, based on the 1961 novel The Fringe Dwellers by Western Australian author Nene Gare. [2] The film is about a young Aboriginal girl who dreams of life beyond the family camp that sits on the fringe of white society (the term fringe dwellers having specific application in Australia).
The film is acclaimed as being the first Australian film featuring Indigenous actors in all the major roles.[ citation needed ] [3] It achieved critical and international success when it was released in 1986, but gained only a lukewarm reception in Australia. [4]
Trilby (Kristina Nehm) is a young Aboriginal woman living with her people on the outskirts of everyday Australian society. Trilby encourages her mother (Justine Saunders) to apply for a Housing Commission home being built in an area inhabited mostly by wealthier white families. Her mother, sister Noonah, and Trilby save enough for them all (father and younger brother as well) to move there from the "fringe". They buy some new furniture for the house and improve their station in life. But there is a culture clash. Trilby learns that her family is actually happier surrounded by their community and extended family, and that her own goals are not necessarily the goals of others in her life. With xenophobic neighbors casting a constant judgmental eye, Trilby and her boyfriend, Phil (Ernie Dingo), attempt to find happiness in their new environment. Trilby becomes pregnant, gives birth, but drowns her baby, making it look like an accident. Her family leave their suburban house after Trilby's father loses all their rent money in a card game: the family return to their house in the camp. Trilby, however, leaves on a bus bound for the city.
Beresford had been interested in making a film from the novel since he read it in the mid-1970s, buying his copy at a second-hand book shop in London. Funding was difficult to raise but eventually was done through the Australian Film Commission and Queensland Film Corporation. [5] The Fringe Dwellers was shot in Cherbourg and Murgon, Queensland, Australia.
The film was nominated for seven AFI Awards and won for the Best Adapted Screenplay (Bruce Beresford, Rhoisin Beresford). It was also entered into the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. [6] Some Aboriginal activists walked out of the screening at Cannes. [5]
The Fringe Dwellers grossed $174,433 at the box office in Australia. [7]
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Bruce Beresford is an Australian film director, opera director, screenwriter, and producer. He began his career during the Australian New Wave, and has made more than 30 feature films over a 50-year career, both locally and internationally in the United States. He is a two-time Academy Award nominee, and a four-time AACTA/AFI Awards winner out of 10 total nominations
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The term fringe dwellers has been used in Australia to describe groups of Aboriginal Australians who camp on the outskirts of towns and cities, from which they have become excluded, generally through law or land alienation as a result of colonisation. In Adelaide, South Australia, the term was applied particularly in the early days of settlement to those who camped in the Adelaide park lands around the city centre.
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Nene Gare was an Australian writer and artist, best known as the author of the novel The Fringe Dwellers (1961), which was made into the 1986 Australian film of the same name directed by Bruce Beresford.
Susan Kathleen Milliken is an Australian film producer and author.
The Fringe Dwellers is a 1961 novel written by the Western Australian author Nene Gare. It was made into a 1986 film of the same name directed by Bruce Beresford.
Robert James Merritt, known as Bob Merritt or Bobby Merritt and credited as Robert J. Merritt, was an Aboriginal Australian writer and activist. He is especially known for his play The Cake Man, and for founding the Eora Centre for the Visual and Performing Arts.