Black and White trailer
BLACK AND WHITE is a highly charged period drama about one man's conviction that changed a nation. Based on true events, BLACK AND WHITE is a compelling and even-handed look at a trial that galvanized Australia in the fifties.
It is Christmas 1958 in Adelaide, a city that prides itself on its peaceful, well-bred qualities. An excitable young lawyer, David O'Sullivan (Robert Carlyle), is given the news that he has drawn a 'bad lottery prize' - a no fee case where he must defend a young Aboriginal man Max Stuart (David Ngoombujarra) who has been arrested for the murder of a nine year old white girl.
O'Sullivan and his partner, Helen Devaney (Kerry Fox), faces a most erudite and ambitious prosecutor, Roderic Chamberlain (Charles Dance), who feels he is the empire's last bastion against barbarism. But O'Sullivan is immediately suspicious. It's obvious that Max did not write his own confession and the prosecution changes evidence willy-nilly, torpedoing any proper defence. O'Sullivan fights for Max like a man possessed.
BLACK AND WHITE is eerily, painfully contemporary; its real focus is the nature of justice in a world overrun by prejudice and suspect media - and populated by inevitably flawed human beings.