From a friend's porch in Larapinta, a suburban pocket west of Alice, we witnessed a domestic dispute break out among the family next door. At first it was a bit of shouting and shoving. When one man appeared on the scene wielding a golf club in one hand and an axe in the other, we called the cops.
More than 20 minutes elapsed before they arrived, by which time the dispute had subsided. We were perturbed. It could be the police were busy attending another call-out. But their laconic attitude gave the distinct impression they weren't all that concerned. We couldn't help but wonder if the response would have been different had it been a white family.
'The funny thing about Alice Springs is that it runs on a much more dangerous racism,' says Warwick Thornton, filmmaker and lifelong Alice local. 'I don't see any racism, because I'm Aboriginal. The racism is white people talking to white people. It's that latent racism you don't see.'
Thornton's debut feature Samson and Delilah is an ode to his town and its extremes. It's an ethereal love story between Aboriginal adolescents, that takes place against a backdrop of addiction, violence and displacement. Racism is not an explicit presence in the characters' lives, but it is there, like a foul breath that muggies the air around them.
Samson and Delilah are young teenagers from a remote community. Samson sedates the grinding tedium of his life by sniffing petrol. Delilah lives a somewhat more comfortable existence — her artist grandmother makes a reasonable living off her painting sales.
Soon Samson's cumulative boredom and frustration leads to a violent altercation with his older brother, while Delilah incurs blame and a beating from the local women when Nanna dies in her sleep. The two are outcasts, and they embark on a pilgrimage to the town, where they take up residence beneath a bridge on the dry bed of the Todd River.
Samson and Delilah barely speak to each other, except with gestures and body language. But a bond formed out of necessity grows into a love borne from the fight for survival. And just as their love remains largely unspoken, so do many of the film's salient themes.
The exploitation of Indigenous artists; the largely ineffectual but pervasive presence of Christianity, residual of the region's missionary history; the disinterest of white tourists, for whom the homeless teens are a nuisance or barely glimpsed spectres;