Breaker Morant

Breaker Morant (1980) is Bruce Beresford's Australian war drama, available to watch online on iFILM. South Africa at the turn of the century, a military tribunal, and three officers on trial for shooting prisoners.

Lieutenant Harry 'Breaker' Morant and two fellow soldiers carried out the dirty orders of a brutal counter-insurgency. When the killings threaten to blow up into a diplomatic mess, the British command moves to disown its own tactics and pins the blame on the colonials. Their defense counsel (Jack Thompson), handed barely a day to prepare, turns the show trial into a fight the General Staff never bargained for.

Edward Woodward plays Morant with no heroic gloss — a poet, horse-breaker and soldier cornered by someone else's politics. Beresford adapted a Kenneth Ross play and the real 1902 case; the film took ten Australian Film Institute awards, and Thompson carried home a Cannes prize for the defense role. One for anyone who likes a courtroom drama where the verdict is rigged and the real argument is about conscience. Stream Breaker Morant (1980) online on iFILM.