Looking back at the year in film (2000), we've seen some really interesting and diverse Australian movies on our big screens with everything from Chopper and Looking For Alibrandi to commerical hits The Dish and The Wog Boy, doing well at the local box office. In these films, we've examined our national identity in one way or another, so it seems fitting that a film like Cunnamulla should come along to round it all off.

Cunnamulla was made by one of Australia's most successful and dedicated documentary makers, Dennis O'Rourke. He's been making docoumentaries for the best part of 25 years now to much acclaim. His 1988 film Half Life was nominated for an Oscar and The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991) still inflames arguments around dinner tables. So his new doco Cunnamulla - O'Rourke's second ever on Australian soil - is sure to raise as many eyebrows as it will simultaneously win praise.

For this latest film, O'Rourke spent the best part of a year filming people in the outback Queensland town of Cunnamulla, a town located 800 kilometres west of Brisbane and at the end of a train line - a metaphorical fact not lost on the film mkaer or the people who inhabit the town and the film. Cunnamulla is a powerful film, poetic, confronting and most importantly, courageous; it's a film unafraid to show a side of Australia some people may not be comfortable seeing.

Cunnamulla displays great nerve and artistry; it's subjects (or "characters" as O'Rourke likes to call them) are people we all know; they are in the end "us", the film makes that very clear - these guys show us exactly what they're made of. It's this courage and honesty which is Cunnamulla's gift to us all and finally its trump card. It's an uncensored work filled with universal truths, REAL people, sadness, humour and a beautiful big grey area. (Yeah, that sounds like the country I live in...) It's hard not to conclude after seeing Cunnamulla that there should be more Australian documentaries made like this one as it reminds us that documentary is film, not a tv half hour.

Other conclusions...? Well, for this reviewer, Cunnamulla is the best Australian film I've seen all year, worthy of a five star rating.

5 stars

If you hold a romanticised view of life in sunny Australia, Dennis O'Rourke's Cunnamulla might prove an eye-opener, but for the rest of us it holds little that is revelatory.

O'Rourke takes his camera to small-town Cunnamulla at the end of the railway line in the state of Queensland, Australia. As Neredah, the chain-smoking wife of taxi driver Arthur, keeps telling us, life at the "end of the line" feels just like that, a dead-end. Teenage girls turn early to sex and alcohol as their only forms of entertainment, whilst young Aboriginal men such as Paul turn to theft in a predictable cycle of poverty and hopelessness. The older generation gossips, gambles, and listens to country music.

As a small-town veteran who has succeeded in his profession, O'Rourke walks the line between insider and outsider, opening a window on the lives of the ordinary people who seem so willing to share their stories with him. The problem with this film, however, is that there seems to be not much to tell past a repetitive set of complaints about life in the town, and O'Rourke, with his hands-off approach, doesn't do much to push through the surface of the story.

For instance, the film makes only a perfunctory effort to portray the Aboriginal peoples of the town, largely through the representative testimony of Paul, who's likely heading to jail for his petty crime. A few snippets of other Aboriginal peoples provide little in the way of balance to Paul's monologue or popular stereotypes, and cast little insight on the segregated life of the town.

Likewise, the lives of Herb, the eccentric scrap merchant, Cara the teenage dropout, or Marto the town DJ and rebel, remain opaque to the viewer, unilluminated by any context to the lopsided interviews; how did these people end up in Cunnamulla? Who makes up the rest of their family? O'Rourke largely edits out his own questions that elicit the talking-head monologues that make up most of the film, creating an impression of realism when in fact what we are given is a snapshot of lives cut off from history-either their own, or the region's.

O'Rourke sketches the impression of a cast of small-town characters and caricatures, from the disaffected youth to the dog-catcher-cum-mortician. The hints we get of the larger stories that might connect these people to the movements of history-one Aboriginal woman's numb performance of a Christian hymn, a throwaway reference to landowning farmers who don't employ the locals-are never followed up. Instead, we get life in Small Town Anywhere, the limited outcome of a film project that seems, in the end, like a missed opportunity.