Molly (Everlyn Sampi), Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), and Gracie (Laurie Monaghan) are Aboriginal girls (ranging in age from about 9 to 14) who, in 1931 Australia, are kidnapped by legal mandate from their homes in order to be re-educated as domestic servants and, eventually is the hope, bred out by the colonial whites. Chief Protector of the Aborigines A.O Neville (Branagh) feels that this is the right thing: his crime isn't hate, necessarily, but the kind of entrenched ignorance that one day becomes hate. At first opportunity, the three girls escape the camp and begin a 1,500-mile walk back to their homelands with only a rabbit-proof fence (that splits the continent into three parts in an effort to contain feral bunnies) as their navigator.

Based on the memoirs of Doris Pilkington (Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence), the daughter of Molly, Rabbit-Proof Fence takes place during a particularly shameful period in Australia's history while shedding little light on the source of the attitudes and traditions that shaped that country's integration laws. (An ongoing debate "down under" as evidenced by the tremendous symbolic importance of Olympian (and Aborigine) Cathy Freeman lighting the torch during the 2000 Sydney Olympics.) The picture is essentially about the ingenuity and dogged determination of resourceful Molly as she outwits a tracker (brilliantly played by David Gulpilil), and about the thin-lipped determination of Neville (called "devil" by the Aborigine girls in isolation) to "save" the native population from itself.

Looking, feeling, and sounding (with a score by Peter Gabriel that reminds of Maurice Jarre's work on Aussie Peter Weir's films The Year of Living Dangerously and Witness) like the classic Australian cinema of the 1970s, the piece regardless is indicated with a lightness at its core. It is an uplifting story of overcoming a wrong, no question, but its history is as scant as its ultimate message. It has nothing more to say than what the little engine that could might have to say, providing an almost tentative invitation to engage in a discussion about what happened in Australia's government in that period (lasting until less than thirty years ago, shockingly) and no more. It's a great story told well, but with issues as large and as vital as those broached by the picture, there remains the hint of frustration that Rabbit-Proof Fence wasn't something more than a meek opening salvo to a greater conflagration.-Walter Chaw