I finally went to use my free passes for VDL yesterday afternoon and forgot to take them!
BA!
However I continued bravely into the cinema and paid money for a ticket!
From the very first moment the enormous emptiness of Tasmania broods over this film like a dark dank wet cloud.
The bitterness of snow and gale, the soaking of continuous rain the simple untouched nature of the wilderness.
The film is about Tasmania and the effect it has on a group of prisoners escaped from what is in effect the end of the line for transported working class British and Irish prisoners.
Slave labour in a prison without bars.
It's late spring here and I was next to shivering watching it.
It's blunt, it gritty beyond good taste and the colours are muted by shadow.
It's not that the film is in bad taste but that it is about men and life beyond taste where life and death are moments apart and people have been beaten down by the "majesty" of the British Empire.
It's life in a forest where literally no man has ever set foot.
Even the silence is oppressive.
You need to see it on as big a screen as possible in my opinion, so if you get the chance see it at a cinema.
Edits: 11/09/09
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Topic - Van Diemen's Land - dave c 21:03:47 11/09/09 (1)
- RE: Van Diemen's Land - townsend 16:43:40 11/10/09 (0)