Sweet Country(2017)
dir. Warwick Thornton
A western where the man on the run is the hero.
Where to watch: Free: Roku Channel, Pluto TV, Plex, Tubi, Kanopy, Hoopla; Prime Video subscription; rent $2.99 Amazon and Fandango At Home, $3.99 Apple TV (JustWatch US, checked 2026-10-09). Verify.Letterboxd ↗
In 1929 in the Australian outback, an Aboriginal stockman named Sam Kelly kills a white man in self-defense and runs with his wife. A posse follows, and the film unspools the chase across a landscape that doesn't care. Thornton, an Aboriginal director, shoots the frontier like a western that remembers who it left out.
Why it’s here
The film takes the western and turns it around. What's punk is Thornton's refusal to let the story be about white guilt: the camera stays with Sam. What's pedagogical is how it puts the law on trial. Pairs with The Secret River, Dark Emu and Carpentaria. Note: violence, including a sexual assault and racist abuse; slow and spare. The cast includes Sam Neill and Bryan Brown.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- Australia
- Topics
- colonialism
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
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Seven teens left home for school. None came back.
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The Mismeasure of Man
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Scientific racism, caught with its thumb on the scale.
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Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
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Britain's Kenyan detention camps, from the archives.
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A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
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The deals that drew the Middle East in a hurry.
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Beauty Is a Wound
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Indonesia's century, told by a woman back from death.
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Culture and Imperialism
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How novels made empire feel normal.
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Empire of Cotton: A Global History
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The T-shirt that built capitalism.
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