Aboriginal writer/director Warwick Thornton won the Camera d’Or for Best Feature Film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for ‘Samson and Delilah’. It has since won six AFI Awards, including best film and best director, along with numerous other prizes. Thornton has previously made a number of award-winning short films.
Craig Ruddy was inspired and moved to represent Aboriginal writer/director, Warwick Thornton for his third Archibald submission in 2010, due to Thornton’s raw, honest filmmaking after watching the achingly realistic film, ‘Samson and Delilah’. Thornton had previously made a number of award-winning short films, however ‘Samson and Delilah’ was his first feature length film, which won the Camera d’Or for Best Feature Film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and has since won six AFI Awards, including best film and best director, along with numerous other prizes.
Ruddy noted that Warwick’s strong social consciousness drives him to fearlessly tackle Australian society’s darkest issues surrounding remote Aboriginal communities head on in a dignified and sensitive manner. ‘His film gives a voice to a lost generation who find themselves at the end of a long dark tunnel.’
The first image that came to mind was a slab of black resin with the hint of a portrait shining through from behind. However, having got to know Thornton, Ruddy felt that such an image would be ‘too heavy to reflect him honestly, as he is a very laid-back and gentle person. A fibreglass light box seemed the obvious choice to accommodate the use of light,’ says Ruddy, who chose a primary palette of predominantly red and yellow to reflect Thornton’s use of colour in Samson and Delilah. The portrait title refers to Thornton’s nickname – given him as he often films using as few lights as possible.
Over the past decade or so, Thornton, has emerged as one of the strongest voices in Australian film. His second major release, the brutal western ‘Sweet Country’ (2017) won prizes at two of the world’s leading festivals, Venice and Toronto, and took best film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Thornton’s latest project, ‘The Beach’ was filmed in May last year. Its a combination of nature documentary, memoir, and rehab chronicle, which follows his transformation as he spends more than a month in a tin shack on a remote beach in Western Australia. In six half-hour episodes, we watch Thornton reckoning with his past, his time growing up as an Indigenous kid in Alice Springs, his flaws, strengths and many scars, both internal and external. Through Thornton’s artistic practice and personal storytelling, he carries us deep into the belly of darkness yet holds up a lantern that leads us through to the light.
