Synopsis

“You can pick your mates but you can’t pick your family.”

Cold Turkey explores the relationship of two brothers against a back drop of manipulative mind games.

Shane and Robby are Aboriginal brothers living in Alice Springs. Robby is leaving for a job in the opal fields of Coober Pedy. Feeling abandoned, Shane taunts him into drinking heavily and plots to find a way of stopping him from leaving.

Awakening in a prison cell, the brothers attempt to reconstruct the events of the preceding night – a long night of self-destructive drinking. Gradually the pieces of the nightmare start falling into place, or do they?

A story of disempowerment and the breaking of a spirit, Cold Turkey provides a twist on the theme of “brotherly love”.

Superbly acted by its young and mostly Aboriginal cast, and inventively directed, this intense and unsettling drama offers an insight into the emotional dimension of social dislocation and alienation among young Aboriginal men in an urban context.