Walkabout

Walkabout (1971) is Nicolas Roeg's debut feature you can watch online on iFILM. Based on James Vance Marshall's novel, the film drops two British children — a teenage girl and her young brother — alone in the middle of the Australian outback after their father kills himself without warning, leaving them with nothing but what they're carrying.

They walk. Toward what, they don't know. Out in the desert, they meet an Aboriginal teenager (David Gulpilil) on his traditional walkabout — a solo survival journey marking his transition to adulthood. He speaks no English. They speak nothing he knows. None of that stops him from leading them toward water and food, and the three of them travel together across the red Australian interior while an enormous gap in culture and understanding sits between them, wordless and unresolvable.

Jenny Agutter plays the older girl with a contained, watchful quality that carries the film's emotional weight; Luc Roeg — the director's own son — is the small brother. Roeg shot the landscape like a painter and cut it like a poet, turning a survival story into something closer to a meditation on what is lost when the modern world and the ancient one try to share the same ground. Watch Walkabout (1971) online on iFILM.