The Thousands

Can we shift gears into First Person for a moment? Thanks. I’m not proud of it, but should admit my occasional cultural cringe towards Australian cinema. When I heard “first time director” alongside “refugee comedy” I feared the worst – well-meaning choir-preaching combined with blunt-force political laughs – so no one was more surprised than me to find that LUCKY MILES is actually very, very good.

Iraqi and Cambodian refugees are abandoned in the Western Australian desert, waiting for a bus that never comes. So they walk, lost, arguing about directions, pursued by the authorities. Director Michael James Rowland uses the landscape to great visual effect, shooting the men at great distances, dwarfed by their new surroundings, trapped outside the regular rules of our road movies. The humour’s exactly the right kind of old-fashioned. Without pop-cultural jokes to date it, you can imagine this film still being screened in a decade’s time.

**The political statement LUCKY MILES makes isn’t preachy or complicated: just that no matter where they come from or how they arrive, the people who arrive here are – you know – people.