The exciting part begins when when Muskin’s birth mother came looking for him at the children’s home. (Muskin is Vanya’s friend). Gripped by the guilt of abandoning her own child, Muskin’s mother later committed suicide at the railway station (not shown in the movie) upon learning that Muskin has already been adopted. Since then, Vanya was inspired to look for his own birth mother as he didn’t want the same tragedy to happen.

Vanya learns how to read – in 2 months – to understand the file that holds the information he needs to find her. He then embarks on his quest to find his mother – and encounters the perils of the real world in post-Soviet Union Russia.

I liked this movie a lot, and the story reminded me about another I watched several years back, also about children who ran away so they can return to their real family.

What is a Rabbit-Proof Fence? From what I understand, it is a fence in Australia, made to keep rabbits and other agricultural pests out of Western Australian pastoral areas. However, this movie is not a story about the fence itself, but how the fence guided 3 Aborigine girls back to their mother and their rightful home from the small depot of Jigalong which sits on the edge of the Gibson Desert and 1,200 miles from home.

Historical background: In 1931, AO Neville, the area’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, believes the Aboriginal race is dying out and the answer to the ‘colored problem’ is to breed out the Aboriginal race. To achieve this he has ruled that children of mixed marriages cannot marry full-blooded Aborigines. Settlements are set up across the state and ‘half-caste’ children are removed from their families and prepared for their ‘new life in white society’ as domestic servants and laborers.* Neville orders the removal of Molly, Gracie, and Daisy and relocated them to a grim settlement in Jigalong.

The harsh conditions which the girls are subjected to shocked Molly, and she convinces Daisy and Gracie to run away with her to return home. They do so by using the Rabbit-Proof fence as a guide on a grueling three month journey home. Of course, once discovered missing, the authorities wouldn’t let them off so easily. They hired Moodoo, a master tracker to track them and bring them back.

I remembered this movie because of the similarity between it and ‘The Italian’. While the journey taken by the Russian boy was shorter, like the girls, he also had to elude people who are on his trail and attempting to stop him from reaching his objective.