Warwick Thornton's account of Aboriginal life is different from the rest – because he has lived it

'ITHINK there's room for all of those films that you're about to talk about," cuts in Warwick Thornton. The director of the acclaimed new film Samson & Delilah (it won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes last year) is heading me off at the pass, because he knows I'm about to reel off a list of films that includes Walkabout, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Baz Luhrmann's much-criticised Australia.

The reason? His film, a poetic, personal, hard-hitting love story about two teens who run away from the intolerable conditions they face in their remote Aboriginal community, stands in marked contrast to the rather mystical portrait of indigenous culture Australian cinema tends to favour.

Naturally, then, it's tempting to view it as a reaction to those films, but Thornton, himself an indigenous Australian, isn't having any of it – hence the record-straightening interruption. "I think films made by white directors about indigenous issues… can have a fantastic perspective, and sometimes it does take an outside point of view to recognise something unique or good or bad in a culture," he says.

Besides, he actually liked Australia. "But as a writer and director, I don't have a reaction against those kinds of films or towards them. They have their place in history. The interesting thing, though, is most of those films are period films. No white director tries to tackle indigenous issues through a current spectrum. They still need that buffer of history to write from and to research from."

That's where Samson & Delilah really differs. Drawn from his own observations and personal experiences ("there's nothing in Samson & Delilah I haven't seen personally growing up in Alice Springs"), the film, which takes place initially in an unnamed Aboriginal community in the outback, before shifting focus to Alice Springs, follows the near wordless romance that evolves between the titular troubled teens (beautifully played by newcomers RowanMcNamara and Marissa Gibson). As they're forced to contend with heartbreaking hardship, the film shines a caring, sympathetic spotlight on the plight of Australia's indigenous youth, many of whom are falling by the wayside thanks to the neglect and outdated customs that have created a worrying generation gap.

"That's very specific," says Thornton. "And I do that on purpose to talk to my own people about where are we and who are we. We've got this walking-wounded generation of youth that we're not looking after properly. We hold up indigenous culture as being incredibly strong, something that doesn't blow in the wind, but maybe it should blow in the wind. There are parts of our culture, parts of our existence, that we should be looking at and changing to make us a better bunch of people."

The film, then, doesn't offer a misty-eyed celebration of traditionalism, but it does subtly recognise how complicated an issue it is. As Thornton points out, Aboriginal culture has been whittled down so much that hundreds of languages and traditions have been lost. The reaction, however, has been to protect and enshrine everything that's left, regardless of its relevance to the way people live today. Certain parts of our culture were designed for 200 years ago, when we were quite nomadic. But we aren't those people any more, so let's start looking at the bits of our laws and culture that don't work today and are wrong."

Thornton's progressive, committed outlook can probably be traced back to his somewhat bohemian upbringing in Alice Springs. He never had a father, so was raised by his mother, Freda Glynn, who started an Aboriginal radio station in the 1980s and co-founded the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (Caama). As she was building this "empire", Thornton was left to his own devices and grew up with a lot of indigenous artists and rock bands hanging around the house. He was never forced to go to school, so didn't. Instead, at 13, he became a DJ, spinning records for the prisoner request show, something he references in Samson & Delilah.

He got sick of it, though, so when Caama started a video unit, he got a traineeship as a camera assistant and climbed his way up the production ladder, eventually becoming a cinematographer. Limited employment opportunities convinced him to start writing films he himself could shoot. Samson & Delilah is a natural progression and, to his surprise, he found people throwing money at him to make it. "We got offered a lot more money, but I didn't want it," he laughs. "It was important to me to keep the production small, contained and focused."

Not everyone was so eager for him to make the film; its fairly damning portrait of community life made the Australian government nervous. "Actually," he says, "what was really weird was they weren't really worried about the film when they thought it would just open in Australia, but as soon as they heard it got into Cannes, they got petrified and started worrying about what the rest of the world was going to think."

The good thing, reckons Thornton, is that this "storm in a teacup" opened up a bit of a dialogue in the suburbs when the film opened in Australia, with people asking themselves if there was anything they could do to help the situation. "That was the really beautiful thing. People were just thinking about it or asking questions. That's always a step towards a better place."

• Samson and Delilah is in cinemas from 2 April.