Rabbit-Proof Fence (PG)

I couldn't stop thinking of those repeated lines of Robert Frost: "And miles to go before I sleep/ And miles to go before I sleep," while the odyssey of Rabbit-Proof Fence unfolded. Set in Western Australia in 1931, the film is based on the true-life story of three part-Aboriginal girls who escaped from a resettlement mission and walked across miles and miles of wild terrain – 1,500 of them, in fact – to get back to their family. See it and you'll not moan about the daily commute ever again.

The film also provides a history lesson about Australia's "stolen generations". In the first half of the 20th century, it was official policy to relocate mixed-race Aboriginal children and educate them in the ways of the white Christian. Institutionalised kidnapping, in other words, though certain government bureaucrats saw it as genetic amelioration. A O Neville (Kenneth Branagh), the appointed "Chief Protector" of Aborigines in Western Australia, believes that the solution to the "coloured problem" is to breed out the Aboriginal race altogether: "If only they could understand what we are trying to do for them," he sighs.

The reality of this social engineering is harrowingly illustrated when Neville authorises the removal of three Aboriginal girls, 14-year-old Molly (Everlyn Sampi), her eight-year-old sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and their 10-year-old cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan). A local constable arrives at their home in Jigalong and physically wrests the girls out of their mothers' arms, protesting over their piteous laments that he is simply carrying out the law. The girls are taken 1,200 miles south to Moore River Native Settlement, where the children are housed in dormitories and forbidden to speak their native language. Neville – "Mr Devil", as he is unaffectionately known – pays occasional visits to inspect the skin tone of various children: those of a lighter hue are considered to be more intelligent and therefore candidates for school.

Molly is one of those rejected by Neville, an irony, as it turns out, for she proves to be one of the smartest and most determined charges the Moore River mission has ever taken under its wing. Pining for her mother, she decides to head back home, taking Daisy and Gracie with her – and thus begins one of the most remarkable footslogs of modern times. Dressed in a ragged shift and plimsolls, Molly has only the vaguest idea of heading north; then a kindly farmer's wife happens to mention the rabbit-proof fence not far away, and thus presents a vital clue to orientation. The fence, built to keep the rabbits off pasture land, bisects the country north to south, and Molly knows that following it will, eventually, take them home.

The film is directed by Phillip Noyce, who once spearheaded the new Australian cinema with spiky, intelligent movies such as Newsfront and Heatwave. His career over the past 10 years, however, spent as a hired gun shooting Hollywood rubbish (The Saint, The Bone Collector), inclined one to think he'd given up making films that meant anything. A pleasure to be proved wrong: there is proper confidence in this picture, not least because Noyce has recruited some brilliant technicians. His cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, films the polychromatic Australian landscape quite stunningly, modulating between parched browns, grey-greens, green on black, even black on black, with a canopy of bleached denim sky stretching out to infinity. Silhouettes shimmer against a heat haze, the sun a fireball on the horizon – and miles to go before they sleep. Craig Carter's sound design also contributes vitally to the film's texture, a busily reverberant backdrop of cicadas, birdsong, animal ululations, wind and rain, which Peter Gabriel's music has synthesised into notes: I'm not sure how he did this (the soundtrack took him nine months) but the results are extraordinary.

Noyce has also given his child actors room to develop naturalistic performances, determined not to let any stage-school cutes milk the pathos. Everlyn Sampi's mixture of self-possession and wit will be hard to forget. Branagh seems to save his best for villains: his thin-lipped Heydrich in the Wannsee Conference movie Conspiracy earlier this year was a revelation, and his Neville, while hardly in the same order of infamy, presents a credible combination of monster and missionary. The most interesting character of all is Moodoo (David Gulpilil), the Aborigine tracker hired by the mission to recapture fugitive children. He is a man caught between two cultures, paid by the whites to help enslave his own people yet helpless to leave their employ – his own daughter is an inmate at Moore River. On detecting Molly's latest attempt to cover her tracks, Moodoo says: "Pretty clever, that girl – she wants to go home." These are the only words he utters in the whole movie. Even those words are unnecessary: all we need to see is his ghost of a smile, acknowledging his quarry as someone wily and resourceful as himself.

Moodoo's conflicted nature bears traces of Fred Schepisi's 1978 film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, about a young half-Aborigine who actually buys into the white man's promise of self-betterment: Jimmie marries a white farm girl so that, as Mr Neville ordained, his children will be only a quarter black, but, frustrated by bigotry and hatred, he eventually explodes into violence. It's a great film; much greater, I think, than Rabbit-Proof Fence, which in Christine Olsen's screenplay brings our feelings of historical indignation quickly to the boil. Jimmie dramatises the Aboriginal plight in a morally troubling way. Here, the whites' relocation of the Aborigines is instantly damned as the grotesque cultural mischief that it is, leaving us with nothing to ponder but the girls' brave walk home.

But see Rabbit-Proof Fence in any event, because it has real beauty and feeling. That it is also one of few Australian films ever to deal with the Aborigines' disappearance tells its own story.