Lucky Miles

Colour, 35 mm
Australia, 2007, 105 min
IP – International premiere
Section: Official Selection - Competition

Synopsis

It’s the year 1990 and somewhere on the Australian coast an Indonesian fishing boat comes ashore bearing passengers from Cambodia and Iraq who are trying to enter the country illegally. Disenchanted by false promises, the refugees find themselves on the edge of the desert with three hundred kilometres to the nearest town. The group breaks up and chance brings together the morose Iraqi engineer Youssif, the placid but determined Cambodian Arun, who is looking for his Australian father, and the Javanese fisherman Ramelan, whose curse is to attract catastrophes of all kinds. Like Danis Tanović in No Man’s Land, in his debut, writer-director Rowland treats a political theme with laconic humour born of the absurdity of the situation, without losing sight of its humanistic dimension. The journey of this peculiar threesome in search of the happiness that is civilisation, is traced by an imaginative camera lens, which makes ideal use of the photogenic qualities of the vast Australian plains.

About the director

Michael James Rowland (b. 1964, Australia) worked as Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts (1987–94). He completed his studies at the Australian Film and Television School in Sydney in 1997, graduating with the short film Flying Over Mother (1996), which was acclaimed at festivals all over the world. Rowland has continued to make shorts over the last seven years, when he also wrote screenplays and directed features, documentaries and commercials. On the latter he worked with renowned cameraman Russell Boyd (Oscar for Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World). Rowland has written three books which he also illustrated. He adapted the best known of them, The Existentialist Cowboy’s Last Stand (1995), for a short film which won the Silver Hugo at the Chicago festival. The film Lucky Miles is his feature debut.