This Christmas has been a season of incredible journeys at the movies. Justifiably reigning at the multiplex is the tale of two hobbits traversing an apocalyptic Middle-earth in The Two Towers. Jousting for position at the art house is another amazing expedition: Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence.

In 1931 Australia, constables seize two half-white, half-Aboriginal sisters, 14-year-old Molly (Everlyn Sampi) and 8-year-old Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), and their 10-year-old cousin, Gracie (Laura Monaghan), and send them to the Moore River Native Settlement. That's where "half-castes" like themselves are forced into barracks, bleached of their native culture, and married off or hired out to white settlers. In an odyssey more astonishing than the hobbits' -because it's true - the three girls escape, and the sisters trek back to their tribal community: 1,200 miles across bleak landscapes with a wily tracker at their heels.

Australian filmmaker Noyce, best known as the Hollywood director of the Tom Clancy-derived blockbusters Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, makes his own triumphant return. He and screenwriter Christine Olsen conducted original research, including interviews with Molly and Daisy, as well as relying on a memoir by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington. Watching Rabbit-Proof Fence expands a movie audience's understanding of primal concepts like family and home. In an interview with The Sun, Noyce elaborated on the making of the film:

Because the story is simple, audiences might underestimate how much talent it took to bring Doris Pilkington's book so powerfully to the screen.

In the book, the taking of the children is a lot less dramatic. The parents have already resolved themselves to the reality that they are going to lose their kids. Doris was trying to make a very particular point about the powerlessness of the Aboriginal people before the law. The authorities had complete control because they were doling out rations of food and addictive substances - of sugar and flour and tea and tobacco. Unless you cooperated you weren't going to be getting any.

But for the movie, the screenwriter, Christine Olsen, thought that the taking of the kids needed to be an absolute, memorable focal point. So she combined several forcible removals she had discovered in her research. She also decided to include the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, A.O. Neville, as a character, partly to provide the audience with someone to root against, but also to portray the system as a whole.

The book never explains Neville's theory that seizing mixed-blood children, removing them to places like the Moore River Native Settlement, training them in Anglo-Saxon culture and marrying them off or hiring them out to white settlers would eliminate the Aboriginal strain.

The whole breeding-out aspect - that's something Doris herself wasn't completely aware of when she wrote her book. Neville wrote books where he clearly outlines his theories: Australia's Colored Minority, for example, where he puts forth his view that in order to avoid a "race catastrophe," there needed to be long-term planning to ensure that the white side of the so-called half-caste prevails.

One other character that Christine added is the Aboriginal maid the girls meet at one of the outlying ranches. We can't guarantee that Molly and Daisy met a woman like that. But we do know that in the year Molly was at the camp, 90 percent of the indigenous girls sent to work on farms came back pregnant from their employers.

It is fair to speculate that white employers impregnating these girls were part of Neville's scheme of diluting the indigenous blood.

Although Kenneth Branagh's Neville has been criticized, it's a fascinating portrait of a wrongheaded, high-minded bureaucrat.

Neville kept records on every Aborigine in the state. Looking at copies of those records, reading his books, I thought he was a guy who didn't have an evil bone in his body, even though his schemes wrought enormous havoc. He genuinely believed he was doing the right thing. ... The character may seem unbelievable, but I think we got at the truth of him. He was extremely paternalistic, completely misguided, and he believed he was a sort of savior.

The film's power is based on the eloquence of the girls' performances. How did you find them?

Quickly into the casting I realized that Australian kids in urban areas were polluted by popular culture - like kids all over the world. So we concentrated on remote areas, particularly in the north and northwest of Australia where first contact between Aborigines and whites occurred up to 180 years later than on the East Coast. On the West Coast, contact occurred as late as the 1970s.

Everlyn Sampi, who comes from there, was cast as Molly because she's a forthright, proud, determined young woman with a healthy disrespect for authority. She reminded me of the real Molly, who not only ran away because she wanted to get back to Mom, but also because she distinctly didn't want to be told what to do. Everlyn had never acted before - none of the kids had - but she's a natural actress. She worked it all out instinctively. You could say she's very Method. She's inside every scene; she lives each scene. With most children you manufacture a performance in the editing room. But with Everlyn there was never a case of "Let's look for something we can cut to that can make an audience think this."

We cast kids who could behave like the characters they were playing. The idea was to find a working method that would enable them to be themselves while intersecting with the story. We spent a lot of money trying to create a home away from home for the children, so they could feel really safe being themselves. We took their extended families with them, so they wouldn't be isolated. We gave aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and cousins parts in the movie. And rather than read the script, we talked the story through orally with the girls, so they could tell the story to each other.

We arranged the day's activities around the kids' blood-sugar level. We shot the film with a handheld camera, mainly, with hardly any lighting and not much equipment, so the adults were always ready when the children were. Since the girls weren't "acting," their energy and spontaneity were very important. I mean, they were acting, but it was a different form of acting: it was imagining themselves in a story rather than acting out a story.

The other great casting is David Gulpilil as the Aborigine tracker sent to catch them.

Of course, Nicolas Roeg discovered him in 1969, at age 14, for Walkabout. David has had to walk a path between the traditional land he comes from, Arnhem Land in the north of Australia - an area where non-Aboriginals can't enter without permits - and the world of moviemaking and show biz. He occupies a no man's land in the middle of two seemingly irreconcilable cultures and sets of obligations. So he seemed perfect to play the part of Moodoo the tracker. Also, when I was in film school, he came along for a while to study directing. So I got to know him - and I learned that it would be hard for anyone to escape from him!

That became a key to the story of his character. The first sequence we did with David was down in the riverbank; I was trying to describe how the children could have gotten away from him. He patiently listened to my explanation of how they eluded him by going into the water. He said, no: you can't hide from a tracker in the water - he'll see how the rocks are disturbed. The tracks will be as visible to him as they are in the sand. I said, yeah, David, but if you catch the girls there's no story. He said, all right, it's your movie.

I was feeling pretty silly because, throughout production, he would thoroughly demolish all my theories. But during the shooting of his final scene, I realized exactly what David was saying. If this tracker doesn't catch them it's because he doesn't want to. David, like the character he was playing, wasn't going to say that straight out. He was just waiting for me to catch up to him. And I did.

So while he was on camera, I said to him, Now you know they're there, David. At that moment, he gave the wonderful, tiny little smile that changes our whole understanding of the man who's supposedly trying to bring these kids back. When I put the film together, I realized David had been playing with this ambivalence all along. He was seeming as if he was trying to catch them. But he was really pushing them on.

Rabbit-Proof Fence is playing at the Charles Theater, 1711 N. Charles St.