Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne (2006) present radical relocations of their source narratives, Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Raymond Carver's short story ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ (1988), respectively. In shifting the narrative setting from Regency England to twenty-first-century India, primarily, and from the American Pacific Northwest to Australia, these two adaptations foreground race relations that are not thematised in the source texts but are facilitated by the geographical relocation. A comparison of these two films highlights the very different postcoloniality of India and settler-coloniality of Australia: as emphasised in Bride and Prejudice's dialogue, India had been independent from Britain for nearly sixty years at the point of the film's narrative (and production); as a settler-colonial nation-state, however, Australia, although independent from Britain, has yet to decolonise, a fact central to the film's narrative in its grappling with Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. Where Bride and Prejudice explores the relationships between a postcolonial India and the US and the UK in the context of globalisation, neoliberalism and neo-imperialism, Jindabyne grafts Carver's narrative onto the politics of apology in a settler-colonial context amid attempts to reconcile with Indigenous peoples.

Despite the films’ shared strategy of narrative relocation effecting an exploration of racism, their genres diverge widely: whereas Bride and Prejudice, inspired and inflected by the conventions of Bollywood cinema, is fundamentally a romantic comedy, Jindabyne's drama hinges on trauma, both for individual characters and in terms of the fallout of the colonial encounter. Both films feature an American character out of their depth in a culture to which they do not belong, but whereas Bride and Prejudice's comedy necessitates a forging of this belonging, the settler-colonial context of Jindabyne suggests that belonging is always already impossible. Translation, part of the ‘constellation of terms and tropes’ (Stam 2005, 4) deployed to discuss film adaptation, is particularly apt for examining the relocations of Bride and Prejudice and Jindabyne: ‘Literally “carrying across”, translation is itself a form of migration between languages, places, and cultures’ (Orr 2013, 286); further, both films include translator figures.