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Monsignor Tommaso is an ambitious priest whose life at the Vatican is interrupted when Susan, the lover he deserted fifteen years earlier in Australia, tells him that their daughter has disappeared. Guided by Aboriginal tribesman Willie, Tommaso discovers another world in the Australian outback, where mysticism and tribal magic are prevalent.
Though the film is constructed as a thriller (Tommaso's daughter goes missing in a part of the country being menaced by a serial killer), it also has conscious fantasy elements, in Tommaso's dreams of an Indigenous Australian man whom he later meets in person in Australia and in the way in which his former lover's pleas for help penetrate his sub-conscious despite his life of isolation in the Vatican City.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Aftershock and the Desert Landscape in Heaven's Burning, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolgnu Boy and The Missing
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Cinema after Mabo 2004; (p. 75-93) In this chapter Collins and Davis 'are intersted in how a familiar icon of Australian cinema, the landscape (in particular the desert landscape, the outback), is suddenly made strange (unbearable even) by a historic event and how this raises questions to do with historical amnesia, shock and memory in a national cinema. In order to sneak up on on this post-Mabo experience of aftershock, we want to place these films in relation to threee critical categories which have been important in making sense of the ad hoc diversity of Australian films.' Source : Australian Cinema After Mabo (2004)
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Aftershock and the Desert Landscape in Heaven's Burning, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolgnu Boy and The Missing
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Cinema after Mabo 2004; (p. 75-93) In this chapter Collins and Davis 'are intersted in how a familiar icon of Australian cinema, the landscape (in particular the desert landscape, the outback), is suddenly made strange (unbearable even) by a historic event and how this raises questions to do with historical amnesia, shock and memory in a national cinema. In order to sneak up on on this post-Mabo experience of aftershock, we want to place these films in relation to threee critical categories which have been important in making sense of the ad hoc diversity of Australian films.' Source : Australian Cinema After Mabo (2004)
- Australian Outback, Central Australia,
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cAustralia,c