AustLit

'During the late 1990s and early 2000s, independent political documentaries, including Clara Law's Letters to Ali (2004) and Tom Zubrycki's Molly and Mobarak (2003), contested the prevailing anti-asylum-seeker discourse in Australian media. Australian feature film-making, however, had been noticeably silent on this issue until the release of Michael James Rowland's debut, Lucky Miles (2007). This film revolves around the quest of three exiles to seek civilization, resist capture and survive in the desert after being abandoned by an Indonesian fishing vessel in remote Western Australia. Pursued by an Army Reservist unit that seems more interested in fishing and football than the (seemingly impossible) task of maintaining border integrity, the three exiles become more and more lost as they wander deeper into the desert.' (p. 29)