Satellite Boy

Satellite Boy (2012)

Courage can take you away from home. Love will lead you back.

When his grandfather's drive-in cinema and home in the outback town of Wyndham is threatened with demolition, a twelve-year-old Aboriginal boy must journey through Australia's bush country — equipped only with ancient survival skills — to stop the city developers.

Date of release
2012-09-08
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (13)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Adventure, Drama, Family
Director
Catriona McKenzie

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 2

Satellite Boy is a 2012 Australian adventure drama film about a young Aboriginal boy struggling to maintain the traditions of his heritage in the modern world when a mining company expands into the region. Written and directed by Catriona McKenzie, the film premiered domestically on 10 December 2012 at the Perth International Arts Festival, two days after being released at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Production

Around the year 2006, writer-director Catriona McKenzie discovered Western Australia's Kimberley region while directing the television series, The Circuit, she felt compelled to tell a story about the Australian outback. Although The Circuit was filmed mainly in Broome, McKenzie visited the Purnululu National Park and its Bungle Bungle Range.

Satellite Boy was the first feature film allowed to shoot in the World Heritage-listed area, with consultation from the Indigenous community. The crew lived in tents and had to carry their equipment on canvas stretchers. Vehicles are not allowed within two kilometres (1.24 miles) of the Bungle Bungles.

McKenzie avoided the film possibly becoming a political statement about mining. She stated, "It's not a political film. It's not anti-mining. But through a whole lot of means, the world is disintegrating. They're stripping everything. Even though it's a resources boom … that means you just can't drink the water and you just can't eat. If you stay connected to country, you wouldn't do that."

McKenzie has also stated that the movie is a "love letter" to her adopted father who showed her "love through action". She added that she "was also interested in the idea of tradition and traditions. And the generational gap. The context for that is the notion of country that I speak about later on".

McKenzie stated that she wrote the film for David Gulpilil, who won the $50,000 Red Ochre Award at the Australia Council's National Indigenous Arts Awards for long career in Aboriginal arts. McKenzie likened having Gulpilil in her film to working with "[Robert] De Niro or [Meryl] Streep." Gulpilil also struggled with gout at the time of filming, which received additional praise from the director.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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