The feature film Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) was prompted by and responds to Bringing them Home (1997), the controversial national inquiry into the thousands of Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their families by Australian state authorities from 1900 to 1970, an inquiry that changed the face of Australia's self-understanding. While not the first film to deal with this subject, Rabbit-Proof Fence is a ‘breakthrough film’. It earned more than AUS$1.2 million in its first week of screening, reversing the historical lack of interest by Australian audiences in films about Aboriginal people. More than this, it became the film of the Stolen Generations, providing a set of powerful images that captured the popular imagination of both young and older Australians.

Set in outback Australia in 1931, the film takes its name from the wire fence that once ran from the south coast of Western Australia through to the north, acting as a barrier to rabbit hordes migrating from the east to the west. For the three Aboriginal girls at the centre of this true story – Molly (Everlyn Sampi), Daisy (Tianna Sainsbury) and Gracie (Laura Monaghan) – the fence is a lifeline. After escaping from the isolated Moore River Native Settlement where they were taken to be trained as domestic servants, the girls use the rabbit-proof fence to navigate their way across more than 2000 kilometres of some of the world's harshest terrain to their home in Jigalong, a small government outpost located at the far north end of the fence.