Samson and Delilah

dir. Warwick Thornton
Australia, 2009

Utterly surprising, wonderful film about Aboriginal teens in the middle of Australia in love and running away to the nearest city. They hardly talk to each other, communicating in looks.

Amazingly, it manages to make the "white man's world", as one hobo describes it, look utterly alien. There's a scene where the girl (who is never named, but we assume she's called Delilah) watches to blonde-haired, blue-eyed teen schoolgirls sitting on a park bench talking on their mobile phones, and Thornton manages to make these two normal girls look so strange, so odd, it's unbelievable - the film is so entirely through and from the perspective of S & D that everything that isn't their world seems part of another planet altogether.

She's a total hero too, especially for the last third of the film where in a leg brace (after getting run over) she carries logs for firewood, kills and cooks dinner, makes a shack into a home, starts up the pump for the water, all whilst he lolls around in gas-fume-enduced oblivion (by this point he is going through cold turkey). She has such a wonderfully understated expressive face that she can communicate love, slight irritance and amusement all at once.

101 Rekjavik

dir. Baltasar Kormakur
Iceland, 2001

Walk The Line

dir. James Mangold
USA, 2005

Flicking channels found it on C4. Very good, like everyone's said, held together by great performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon.