The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the MOMA once again bring us NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS, one of the more impressive film festivals on the New York calendar. Each year these cultural powerhouses team up to curate a program of fictional and documentary films from new visionaries, lending their caché (and very comfortable theaters) to a formidable roster of filmmakers from all over the world. The NDNF programmers seem to have culled the best from the festival circuit, including many films I recognize from the recent Sundance lineup and one from the 2009 Cannes Festival, Samson And Delilah, which won the Camera d’Or there for best first feature. I admit this is part of what drew me to the film, the other part being the subject at hand.

I recently saw Bran Nue Dae, an indigenous musical love story set in an Aboriginal community in Australia. And Samson And Delilah is, well, an indigenous love story set in an Aboriginal community in Australia, so I was curious. Turns out that’s about all these two films have in common. Bran Nue Dae is a toe-tapping romp through coming-of-age that puts a decidedly light-hearted spin on some of the issues facing Australia’s indigenous communities. Samson And Delilah is a deeply affecting but pitch-dark descent into that same territory. Interestingly both films have Aboriginal directors, but ones who have taken opposite approaches in their portrayals.

Samson And Delilah is set not on the coast but in the arid Central country, and though heavily influenced by music its characters do not burst into song. In fact they barely even talk. The dialogue is sparse to the point of nonexistent, pushing us to read the subtleties of expression and gesture through which the characters communicate. The reggae beats and country songs that drift through the film are bright, but their warmth carries the same ominous undertone of dread that thrums through the parched landscape. The heat and dust are so palpable, the ramshackle buildings and detritus so broken, that even when boy meets girl you feel a heaviness to the sweet moment.

Our two mythically-named leads, the young buck Samson and the good Delilah, live in a miniscule settlement of sorts. A few characters people their lives — Samson is loosely under the roof of a group of men who seem to do nothing but play reggae; Delilah lovingly tends her grandmother, assisting with her paintings and taking her to clinic and church in her wheelchair. Though barely a teenager Delilah carries herself with the grace of a woman. When Samson comes round she rebuffs his juvenile advances with an almost comical irritation. But he gamely returns again and again, bringing her an offering of a slain kangaroo and laying his bedroll next to hers. She throws his things over the fence, he brings them back over. And so it goes until her grandmother passes away and Delilah is left to truly fend for herself. She hacks off her hair with a knife (a sign of mourning in her community) and slowly begins to lean on the resourceful Samson.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, Samson and Delilah end up stealing a car and leaving for Alice Springs, the closest big city. Any sense of adventure this journey carries is soon overridden by the harsh realities of homelessness and Samson’s increasing addiction to sniffing petrol for a cheap high. He becomes selfish and neglectful, and it suffices to say that Delilah suffers terrible abuses in this phase of their story. The film goes to the brink of darkness but ends on a fragile note of hope, reuniting the young lovers and bringing them to a place of relative peace and healing.

I found this film astonishing, particularly how it manages to be gorgeous and crushing at the same time. The director and cinematographer Warwick Thornton well deserves his Cannes honor — he achieves a lyrical beauty with material that in less capable hands would be unbearably preachy or exploitative. Relying on almost non-verbal performances and stunning visuals the film quietly but hypnotically builds to a frantic pitch as the stakes escalate. Thornton smartly implies violence rather than lingering on its action, making the dread and pain of these dark moments more powerful. He unwaveringly faces the issues of addiction, sexual abuse, and homelessness, drawing from his own experiences and those he witnessed in his own days on the streets of Alice Springs. And yet in the end the film transcends all that. It is truly a film about love: how it can hold, sustain, and ultimately heal us despite the cruelties of the world.