RABBIT-PROOF FENCE
PG, 93 mins

ON TUESDAY NIGHT the Regus London Film Festival opened with a picture worthy of a tabloid front page. Dirty Pretty Things is a thriller about the ghastly practice of selling body parts for passports. It’s a satire about corruption, cheap labour and shadowy illegals; a penny dreadful that features sadistic immigration officers and back-street butchers.

It’s an appalling indictment of a system that doesn’t work and a scary insight into a problem that — in the mind of the writer Steven Knight at least — is wildly out of control.

Rarely has a first-night film spluttered with so much topical venom, yet sustained such terrific suspense. Stephen Frears, its director, may have lost the playful sparkle of High Fidelity, but this must surely rate as the finest polemic of his beautifully laundered career.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a Nigerian medic, Okwe, fleeing from persecution in his native country. By day he is an affable minicab driver. At night he is a hotel receptionist whose main duty is to turn a blind eye to the trade-plying of the local prostitute. To all intents and purposes the hotel, the Baltic, is an upmarket pile in West London. But behind the door marked “Staff Only” is the heat and squalor of a Third World stew. Here, everyone lives in fear of the immigration squad which, ironically enough, is made up of immigrants itself.

The real drama doesn’t officially take off until Okwe pulls a human heart out of the U-bend of a blocked hotel room lavatory. By this time Frears has quietly established the hierarchy of humiliation in small telling scenes rather than wild broad strokes. Unable to report his grisly discovery to the police without being booted out of the country, Okwe is forced to do his own sleuthing. The discovery of a kidneys-for-passports scam, using medieval medical equipment and the pastry chef as surgeon, is sprung on us with livid force. “The man said it would be like taking out a tooth,” says one eager Somali girl. The results are not for the queasy. “It’s simply business,” argues Sergi López’s marvellously twisted hotel manager.

López might be as cynical about the system as his motley staff, but he exploits it exquisitely. Like Mephistopheles, he toys with Okwe’s overdeveloped conscience, tempting him with (forged) official papers and money of which he could only previously dream. Curiously, and cleverly, there isn’t a single white Anglo-Saxon perspective in the film, but the capital city has rarely looked so familiar.

Credibility sometimes droops at the script’s more zealous excesses. One of Okwe’s less convincing sidelines is renting his services to sexually desperate men in the back of the minicab office. The sight of the exhausted doctor reluctantly falling to his knees before three of the cheesiest lowlifes you could scrape off the streets of Brixton made the Festival audience laugh as much as it squirmed.

That Frears manages to humanise the bulk of Knight’s prickly script is no mean reflection of his powers as a storyteller. The director’s ability to defuse the self-importance of key writers like Alan Bennett, Hanif Kureshi and Nick Hornby is one of his more remarkable skills.

But what really distinguishes Dirty Pretty Things is the emotional tenor of the performances. With acting this good it’s almost churlish to do anything more elaborate than point the camera. Audrey Tautou, light-years away from her Amélie persona, is mesmerising as the painfully shy Turkish cleaner with chocolate-box dreams of New York. After being hounded out of the Baltic hotel by our diligent immigration cops, she is forced to work for a seedy sweatshop owner. Self-mutilation would seem the kinder option.

And Ejiofor is simply outstanding as the gentle Nigerian with the dignity of a saint. Every sharp, humiliating dig is internalised, absorbed like a sponge, or simply stifled to death. The awkward wooden respect these two aliens have for each other sweetens this dispiriting tale — enough, indeed, to secure an improbable and touching romance.

Dirty Pretty Things isn’t the only festival film oiled by sheer bloody anger. Phillip Noyce’s latest film, Rabbit-Proof Fence, takes the lid off a scandal that has rocked Australia to its redneck roots. Between 1910 and 1970, apparently, it was government policy to remove mixed-race Aboriginal children from their parents in order to breed the colour out of them.

Few indigenous films have created such a powerful stink as this true-life epic about three mixed-race girls who walked 1,200 miles (2,000 km)home after being “stolen” from their mothers in the 1930s. According to the Chief Protector of Aborigines (Kenneth Branagh), there is no room for “an unwanted third race”. Molly (Everlyn Sampi), her younger sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and their cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan) are earmarked for “purification”.

The terrible wrenching departure from their homes is all over in a splash of dust and a flurry of Jeep wheels, as it must have been for thousands of Aboriginal children forcibly ripped from their families and relocated to work camps and orphanages. “In spite of himself the native must be helped,” sighs Branagh’s A.O. Neville with a wry smile and a small shrug. He is explaining official policy to a group of narcoleptic, half-dead, blue-stockinged matrons at a slide-show in Perth.

Neville is that most dangerous of enthusiasts: an idealist who believes people must be bleached by careful management of their marital unions. The queasy point of this genetic insanity doesn’t need labouring.

How these puny waifs find their way home after escaping the orphanage and following a rabbit-proof fence that once bisected the continent from north to south is the moving heart of the story. It’s an odyssey of Shackleton-like endurance and Fagin-like guile. Hunted by the police, state troopers and trackers, the girls manage to stay two plods ahead, staggering across the shimmering scrubland and parched deserts like victims of a Benetton ad campaign. It’s impossible not to be moved by their pluck. Chris Doyle’s fantastic camerawork conjures iconic images of vulnerability and staggering beauty from the elemental landscape. Peter Gabriel provides a rousing score.

• Dirty Pretty Things goes on general release on Dec 13; Rabbit-Proof Fence opens tomorrow

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