Plot summary

A double murder in a tropical Australian bayou of crocodiles and mangrove swamps unravels a dynastic alliance between formidable fishing clans. An ill-fated love gone horribly wrong sees questions of guilt and complicity ripple out far beyond the killers. What are the unforeseen consequences of the small choices we all make in our lives? How does an unyielding landscape imprint upon us? And who do we become in a world without rules?THE CAPE is a wrenching psychological journey into a story about the nature of guilt and complicity born of the unsuspecting power of the small choices we all make in our lives. Choices that, once accumulated one upon the other, become possessed of a cascading force.It is set in a small world within an unending expanse. A tiny community of hard-bitten fishing clans who work the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria in Australia's remote, Western Cape York Peninsula and live in ramshackle coastal encampments amid the mangrove swamps.They are an unseen culture to themselves, with their own rules and rhythms, that even Australians do not know exist. Theirs is a land of crocodiles, sharks, and wet seasons that swallow the region whole for five months of the year. Their work is gruelling and ceaseless. Nets are laid from precarious dinghies, then harvested of prized barramundi as giant crocs and predators roam.These families raise themselves; so isolated, their children are educated by schools over two-way radios; for seasons on end each clan only encounters the other; outsiders are few, and usually transient. Some, however, do know these clans. At least as anyone can. Those who've tried their hand at the life of a Barra fisherman and learned the hard way. The Traditional Owners who forage the land to this day. Former deckhands. The fisheries inspector who has long tried to monitor their operations. The Mayor of the Aboriginal Council. The Ranger who protects the rivers for future generations. A grizzled country cop who's spent years keeping them in check.They are our voices of The Gulf. They carry us through our journey. They are our guides, our sages, our confidantes, our Greek chorus. We turn to them. To help us understand what's happening before us and to weigh the deeds as they are done. These voices, too, navigate our story through an Indigenous world. For the Gulf is a land of First Peoples. It is a black community with white stories encased within.Throughout the film these Gulf voices sow our thematic seeds: of isolation, of a small society unbound by societal norms, of an overwhelming landscape's power to shape the lives of those who live in it, and of the nature of our guilt. For when the disappearance on an eerily calm sea of a 10-year-old boy and his father turns into a murder investigation, a hidden story is revealed.The boy's mother is having an affair with a childhood friend from another clan who'd never stopped pining for her. A tale unravels of two matriarchs manoeuvring to bring the illicit lovers together in an alliance of the two dynasties. Dynasties on a journey from a place of warm gatherings and family get-togethers into the shadows and darkness of mercenary plotting. The emergence of a scheme for the murdered father, an outsider brought into this world, to be quietly shut out. And how choices made as a marriage deteriorates unconsciously leads to a little boy's death - surely an unintended consequence of a plan gone very, very wrong.We see how one act of violence radiates guilt far beyond the killers. Through whole families. Through an entire community. Questions of complicity, and the very nature of guilt, shroud them all. In THE CAPE we interrogate these themes, and these people. With subtlety. But with the journalistic ferocity this story demands. Hidden ambitions are unearthed. Hopes metamorphosed into ugly display. Secret chambers of people's souls revealed.How do these dynastic harmonies go so terribly wrong? How do our choices, with effects both intended and unintended, tear apart so many lives? Within this foreign place there is the recognisable, everyday pain of humanity. We can all see some piece of our own lives within those of these clans. Unexpected pregnancies, the slow and gut-wrenching breakdown of a marriage, the seduction of illicit affairs. But few of us exist in a world so absent the guardrails of civilization.This is how these people have come to live with murderers amongst them. For all those living in The Gulf, this is a story - so far - without resolution.This is the bizarre, dark journey of THE CAPE. Entering a land so other-worldly, inhabited by people seemingly so different, that their lives cannot possibly mirror those of our own cosseted humanity. And yet, they do. Within the shared threads of the human experience the audience finds in these real-life characters, comes also the darkness that dwells within us all.