The Nightingale

Even with its flaws, this feminist Western is too violent, too dirty, too bloody, and too barbaric to be forgotten easily. When the lights in the cinema came on, the woman next to me was crying and, a few rows over, someone murmured that they had now had PTSD. 'The Nightingale’ is not an easy film to watch and certainly not one to expect to come out of laughing or feeling terrific. But it will make you will feel something, which is a rare thing for a film to be able to do today.

• Jake Watt

Read Jake's full article... https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-the-nightingale-a-blunt-and-brutal-period-piece

Head to https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/sff for more Sydney Film Festival reviews.

A superb, albeit harrowing drama about colonial violence, misogyny, and racism

Whether the Blacks deserve any mercy at the hands of the pioneering squatters is an open question, but that they get none is certain. They are a doomed race, and before many years they will be completely wiped out of the land.

• Harold Finch-Hatton; Advance Australia! An Account of Eight Year's Work, Wandering and Amusement in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria (1885)

If Judas Chamberlain can find a black, or brown or yellow race in Asia or Africa, that has as high a standard of civilisat__ion and intelligence as the whites, that is as progressive as the whites, as brave, as sturdy, as good nation-making material, and that can intermarry with the whites without the mixed progeny showing signs of deterioration, that race is welcome in Australia regardless of colour.

• The Bulletin (June 22, 1901)

The land is my mother. Like a human mother, the land gives us protection, enjoyment and provides our needs – economic, social and religious. We have a human relationship with the land: mother, daughter, son. When the land is taken from us or destroyed, we feel hurt because we belong to the land and we are part of it.

• Djiniyini Gondarra; Quoted in Ian R. Yule (ed.), My Mother the Land (1980)

_The attacks on the character and the efficiency of Van Diemonian smallholders bear striking similarities to those made on the Irish and Scottish at this time. In both cases unfavourable contrasts with both 'old English' (hierarchical ordered rural society) and 'new English' (improved and efficient agricultural productivity) were commonly made. In both cases the people were seen to be, if not quite 'savages', at least not fully 'civilised.' And in the penal colony, just as with the Celtic fringe, this judgement was to justify eviction and rigorous social control measures which would deliver exclusive 'ownership' and control of the most productive land to a powe...

Jennifer Kent delivered one of the best horror movies of the decade, The Babadook. With The Nightingale, only her second feature film, she offers one of the most visually brutal, shocking, jaw-dropping, violent revenge stories ever. This movie is the definition of “not for everyone.”

Rating: A-

The Nightingale (2018)
Directed by Jennifer Kent

Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale is a cold, hard look at colonialism, unflinching in its depiction of the brutality that empires are built upon. Set in 1825 Tasmania, it follows Clare (Aisling Franciosi), a young Irish convict, and Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), an Aboriginal tracker, through the wilderness as they pursue a British officer who has committed unspeakable atrocities. This is not entertainment; this is witness, testimony, a reckoning with historical crimes that we would prefer to forget.

Kent has produced an incredible piece of cinema here, one that sits alongside the great historical memory films like Schindler's List, I'm Still Here, Parallel Mothers, and There Is No Evil that refuse to let us look away from what was done in our names or in the names of our ancestors. The brutality and violence are hard to watch, almost unbearable at moments, but they are likely historically correct and perhaps even understated. Kent doesn't sensationalize; she documents. This historical memory needed to be unearthed, and I find her woman-perspective on this history refreshing, essential even.

The timing could not be more relevant. In our current world of Russia, USA, and China, we are watching authoritarianism resurge, watching strongmen deploy the same logics of domination and dehumanization that powered colonial expansion. I would add Netanyahu to that list of modern autocrats, though I suspect the original culprit is this same British Empire for failing to provide a place for Palestinians after World War II. The colonial mindset, the conviction that some lives matter and others are disposable, that some people are fully human and others are obstacles, this hasn't disappeared. It has merely found new expressions, new justifications, new victims.

Aisling Franciosi and Baykali Ganambarr especially deliver amazing performances. Franciosi carries rage and grief in every frame, her Clare both vic...