BENEATH CLOUDS

The wide skies of western Australia bear mute witness to the journey of Vaughn and Lena, two young people hardened before their time in BENEATH CLOUDS. Vaughn is a delinquent “blackfellow,” a youth of aboriginal descent, with an attitude. While he talks the fashionable political talk of a disenfranchised minority, what really locked him up on a penal farm is basic Grand Theft Auto and other niceties of the Thug Life, rather than protesting the loss of his tribal lands. Still, Vaughn feels a connection to the earth, to his family. When he hears that his mother is dying, Vaughn pretends not to care. But he breaks out, in a last chance to see her. Lena, meanwhile, is a fair-skinned girl strongly sensing no future in the dead-end town in New South Wales where she lives. She hits the road for Sydney, hoping to somehow find her father and perhaps even get back to her ancestral Ireland. Lena and Vaughn meet while hitchhiking, she immediately noticing how easily he spooks at the sight of a patrol car. Their initial wariness and antagonism gives way to mutual need, and, ultimately, friendship. But the highway can be a hazardous place, and by the terminus of their sortie together both Lena and Vaughn have been thoroughly road-tested.