Lucky Miles (ATOM Study Guide)

Lucky Miles is a bittersweet comedy about distance, difference and dud maps. It is inspired by a number of true stories of extreme survival concerning refugees roaming through the Pilbara region of Western Australia in the late 1980s.

It's 1990 and an Indonesian fishing boat abandons Iraqi and Cambodian refugees in a remote part of Western Australia. While most are quickly caught by officials, three men with nothing in common but their misfortune and determination escape arrest and begin an epic journey into the heart of Australia. Pursued by an army reservist unit, our three heroes wander deeper into the desert, desperately searching for civilization amongst the stones of the Pilbara.

While the film deals with inherently political material, it does this in an accessible, entertaining and lightly absurdist comic way. In reducing the politics to the personal, it offers insight and engagement through the defiance and humanity of its characters. This is a 'buddy movie' with a difference. The three main characters are Arun, a Cambodian who has travelled from Indonesia on a boat to find his father in Perth, Youssif, an Iraqi engineer seeking asylum and Ramelan, an Indonesian fisherman, one of the crew who abandoned their human cargo on the beach, before the boat sank. The film follows their desperate attempts to survive as they search for Perth or Broome in their trek through the Pilbara desert region of Western Australia.