Mad Bastards

A 13-year-old native Australian boy named Bullet is growing up with his mother in a small, remote Australian town in the northwestern region of Kimberley. But the absence of his father’s authority provokes nothing good, and one day he finds himself in jail on arson charges. The boy’s father TJ decides to abandon his disordered life in the big city and to hitchhike across Australia in order to seek out his estranged wife and the son he’s never met. What influence will the uprooted man’s encounters with various people along the way have on his reunion with his family? And how will the rest of the Aboriginal community respond to the return of a lost father? While writing the script for his directing debut, Brendan Fletcher took inspiration from the stories of native inhabitants in the little-known region of Kimberley. And the casting of nonactors in the lead roles helped create an authentic statement about the ambiguous social standing of Aborigines, which the majority of white Australian society chooses to ignore. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)