Fantastic Fest 2009

Actors Thomas Wright and Mark Winter Live in Person!

Jonathan Auf Der Heide's Van Diemen's Land is a harsh yet gorgeous rendering of a true-life tale of cannibalism in nineteenth-century Australia. In 1822, an Irishman named Alexander Pearce was convicted of stealing six pairs of shoes. Pearce was sentenced to seven years in a remote portion of Australia called VAN DIEMEN'S LAND, or as it would later be called, Tasmania. After various attempts to escape, he was sent to the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station on Sarah Island, which was known as the toughest of the Australian prison colonies. Pearce escaped from Macquarie Harbour but this time, he was accompanied by seven other prisoners. The gang of escapees originally planned to take a boat but instead, they ran off into the unexplored expanse of mountains and rainforests. Pearce was the only one to survive the journey. As he later recounted, the trek devolved into a desperate fight for survival with the escapees waiting for each other to die off or to be killed. Using Pearce's recollections of the experience as a framing device, VAN DIEMEN'S LAND details the prisoners' brutal journey.

VAN DIEMEN'S LAND is a feature-length expansion of Auf Der Heide's short film entitled HELL'S GATE, the name of which is a reference to the mouth of Macquarie Harbour. Comparisons to Werner Herzog are apt as VAN DIEMEN'S LAND shares thematic and visual relationships with works such as AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD. Here, the prisoners struggle against each other and against the harsh landscape that slowly and steadily breaks them down. VAN DIEMEN'S LAND goes to extraordinary lengths to replicate the experience of the original 8 prisoners. Auf Der Heide took his cast and crew to Tasmania where filming took place in the heat, rain, and snow. These efforts comes across on screen as the film captures the grit, the grime, and the desperation that most certainly colored the original events. The dialog adds another layer of texture to the film as the actors speak in a thick brew of accented English and Gaelic, reflecting the prisoner's origins from disparate points across the British Empire. Van Diemen's Land is one of the great cinematic discoveries of 2009. (Rodney Perkins)