Rabbit-proof fence (PG)

RABBIT-Proof Fence is a powerful, moving yet highly flawed film.

It tells the tale of just one Aboriginal family who were torn-apart by the racist state policies ruthlessly pursued by Australian governments throughout the 20th century.

Our story begins in the Western Australian outback of the 1930s when three Aboriginal children from a mixed background of white blood are snatched from their mother's arms by the authorities in a heart-wrenching scene.

The two sisters, Molly and Daisy, and their cousin, Gracie, are then sent to a camp for half-caste children over a thousand miles from home.

The state's plan is to knock the girls' Aboriginal roots out of them and train them to be domestic servants while beginning a process of breeding their future generations out of their indigenous blood back into white Europeans.

Thousands of Aborigine boys and girls were subjected to this shocking and little known form of ethnic cleansing right up until 1970.

The executor of this mad scheme in the 1930s is Chief Protector of the Aborigines AO Neville, played superbly by Branagh who brings a human face to a man who could so easily have been portrayed as a cardboard cut-out.

What Rabbit-Proof Fence tries to portray is that as poisonous as men like Neville were, they were under the belief that what they were doing was for the best interest of the children.

Most of the film concentrates on the three girls' escape from the camp and their attempts to avoid recapture from an Aboriginal tracker and the police who are soon hot on their heels.

The film is competently handled by Australian director Phillip Noyce but he makes a mistake in allowing the girls' remarkable odyssey go for long tracts without dialogue.

As a consequence, the audience never really gets under their skin and the outrage and injustice they must have felt is never explored. I wanted to hear more from the girls about their tragic and amazing story.

It's a real shame because, good as it is, it could have been so much better.

Mono rating: 7 out of 10

Now showing at the UGC Cinemas in Newport and Cardiff and at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff