The Tale of Ruby Rose

The Tale of Ruby Rose (1988)

The year is 1933. Ruby Rose (Melita Jurisic) is an Australian woman living with her Welsh immigrant husband Henry (Chris Haywood) in the Tasmanian highlands. Cut off from her superjudgmental family, for whom Henry had once worked as a humble farm hand, Ruby remains isolated in her tiny house. Superstitiously terrified of the dark, she begins developing her own folklore about the inky blackness that surrounds her each night; this folklore eventually develops into Ruby's own personal religion, created to ward off the evils that she imagines lurk in every corner. Only by venturing out of her house and rekindling her relationship with her embittered father is Ruby able to exorcise her fears. Almost hypnotic in its stark beauty, Tale of Ruby Rose is proof enough that writer/director Roger Scholes deserves to be far better known.

Date of release
1988-05-25
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (6)
Runtime
1h 40m
Genres
Horror, Drama, Thriller
Director
Roger Scholes

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 3. Including: AACTA Award for Best Original Music Score

The Tale of Ruby Rose is a 1988 Australian drama film written and directed by Roger Scholes, produced by Andrew Wiseman and Bryce Menzies, and starring Melita Jurisic, Chris Haywood, Rod Zuanic, Sheila Florance, and Martyn Sanderson.

Production

As the title indicates, the film centres on Ruby and her complex emotions. The character is based on a story told to Roger Scholes by an old woman, Mrs. Miles of Mole Creek Valley. As a young woman, she had lived alone in a hut in the Highlands for four years, without knowing that her husband had died while trying to get back to her in the middle of winter. The experience traumatised her.

Scholes was also interested in the naïve art created by people with mental disturbance or trauma, and its similarities with prehistoric art (he studied case histories as a student in Melbourne). That is why Ruby fills notebooks with her own drawings. She is much younger than her husband Henry, and she was traumatised as a child. She has created her own cosmology, based on fear and observation of the natural world. She feels safe only in the day.

Roger Scholes was interested in the way that isolation had shaped women's lives in this region. In the late 1970s, when he was researching, he met and photographed many people who had lived all their lives in the harsh environment of the Tasmanian Highlands. He was preparing a book based on the interviews and photographs, but it was never completed. He decided to turn the material into a feature film instead.

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

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