iDIDJ Australia Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

Lucky Miles is a bittersweet comedy inspired by true stories of extreme survival and high farce about refugees roaming through the Pilbara region in the late eighties.

It's 1990, and an Indonesian fishing boat abandons a group of Iraqi and Cambodian refugees – one of whom is hoping to find his father in Perth - in a remote part of Western Australia. They’re told that although the location looks deserted, the bus to town is just over the dunes.

They soon discover they’ve landed in the middle of nowhere, and part company on the beach. They split into two groups according to nationality and head off in different directions.

The next day when a group of Cambodian men appear at a remote settlement pub and attempt to buy bus tickets, the police are alerted and the men are detained.

Earlier in the day when an aerial sighting of the fishing boat was reported, an army reserve unit is sent to search the coastline, but believing the sighting unreliable, the unit instead goes fishing.

Within 18 hours the group of Iraqi men is found, but one Youssif (Rodney Afif) has escaped. And by night it appears a single Cambodian man Arun (Kenneth Moraleda) may still be missing in the area around the pub.

Meanwhile, the fishing boat catches fire, and a deckhand Ramelan (the nephew of the boat’s captain) has also found his way to land. So, three men with nothing in common but their misfortune and determination to escape arrest, begin an epic journey into the heart of Australia.

Pursued by the hapless army reservist unit, our three heroes wander deeper into the desert, desperately searching for civilisation amongst the stones of the Pilbara.