![]() It’s something that’s happening now, and happened then in America, and everywhere. Beyond that, I think it’s a universal story. ![]() I mean, I couldn’t put some of the things in the film that happened, because people wouldn’t be able to bear it.īut I also wanted a world that was historically correct because I’m telling a story that’s very important to my people and that we need to face. The story itself is fictional, but the events are all factual, and worse. Nothing that happened in this film is fictional. You only have to look for a very short time to find the atrocities that happened in this film. The world of the film is very well researched we had an Aboriginal adviser who helped us across the board.Īlso I did my own research - there’s a lot out there. I studied this part of my history, the history of my country, for many years. So are there historical stories that parallel this one? Jennifer Kent Matt Netteim/Sundance Institute Alissa Wilkinson Jennifer Kent, director of The Nightingale and The Babadook. Or making it a love story, which would’ve been beyond gross. For me, it’s really exciting to look at telling a story of two characters that on some level were able to transcend that fear, without sentimentalizing it. It’s fear, whether that fear is warranted or not. And so is Billy, for that matter, and he has good reason to be. Clare is a product of her time, so she’s as racist as people would have been back then. What I find off-putting about them is that they tend to romanticize the past. I don’t particularly like period films, and I don’t tend to watch them. Then I realized this wasn’t Ireland at all, but rather Australia.Įventually, I realized that in a lot of ways, The Nightingale is a movie about the many ways being colonized can equal oppression, and the complicated ways that can play out - particularly when Clare encounters the Aboriginal character, Billy, for the first time and she has nothing but disdain for him, even though she’s been treated miserably by the English, who had the same disdain for her. I was! I knew the English had colonized and oppressed Ireland, so I was disoriented until Clare set out into the bush. The first lines you hear that aren’t in English are in Irish Gaelic, and I thought, Oh, are we in Ireland? Jennifer KentĪnd how did that play out? Were you disoriented for a while? Alissa Wilkinson ![]() It took me a few minutes to realize what part of the world we were in when the film started. Our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, follows. (It had its world premiere in Venice in September 2018.) I was especially interested to ask her about the historical setting of the film, how she pursued accuracy in the film’s smallest historical details (such as Aboriginal culture and several of the languages in the film), and why subtitles matter. I caught up with Kent at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the day before The Nightingale had its North American premiere. The Nightingale’s horror is real, rather than psychological, and it grapples brutally with the aftereffects of grief and anger at having your life forcibly taken from you by an occupying force who couldn’t care less about your humanity. Though both The Nightingale and The Babadook are about bereaved women trying to fight their way back to life, Kent’s two films are very different. Though it’s a fictional story, it’s built on a strong foundation of historical research, and the ways it examines the effects of oppression, violence, and brutality on individual people’s lives make it feel strangely modern. ![]() ![]() Whether you can come to see the humanity in someone you once thought was far from your equal - and whether empathy is even possible in the face of unthinkable cruelty - is the driving question behind The Nightingale. In 1825, the English think the Irish are subhuman - but both of them think any of “the blacks” are even more subhuman. One night, things go from horrible to unconscionable, and Clare is left with a burning desire to exact revenge on Hawkins that takes her on a journey through the bush, with only a young Aboriginal man named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) to be her guide. She manages to marry and have a child, but she’s bound to serve an angry and sadistic young English officer named Hawkins (Sam Claflin), for whom her “duties” include working in the kitchen, singing for the soldiers, and being raped. It’s a carefully researched period piece set in 1825 about a young Irish convict, Clare (Aisling Franciosi), who has been sent to live out her sentence in remote Tasmania. And now, five years later, the Australian director is back with another devastating work about a grieving woman: The Nightingale. The movie became an instant horror classic (and spawned all sorts of cheeky memes). Jennifer Kent burst onto the film scene at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival with The Babadook, a psychological descent into the hell of grief and its effects on a desperate mother and her troubled child. ![]()
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