Join us for this special focus on the brilliantly unique films of the Karrabing Film Collective.
Karrabing Film Collective are an indigenous media group who use filmmaking to interrogate the conditions of inequality for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, Australia and to retain connections to land and to their ancestors through this filmmaking practice. The group features an intergenerational mix of more than thirty members, together with anthropologist, activist and professor Elizabeth A. Povinelli, who has worked with the community since 1984, and will present a masterclass on collective filmmaking as part of the HOME Artist Film Weekender 2020.
Together Karrabing Film Collective have sought to create a model for Indigenous filmmaking and activism that brings together different tribes and languages, and conceives works through an infrastructure of communal thinking and collective experimentation.
Programme
Karrabing Film Collective: The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland (2018, 27 mins)
In the not so distant future, Europeans can no longer survive for long periods outdoors in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism, but Indigenous people seem able to. A young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to save the white race, is released into the world of his family. As he travels with his father and brother across the landscape he confronts two possible futures and pasts.
Karrabing Film Collective: Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016, 29 mins)
Three wildly varying accounts are offered by members of an Indigenous Australian family for the cause of their boat’s breakdown, leaving them stranded in the outback. Settler bureaucracy, modern Christian faith and displeased ancestral spirits are invoked in a series of flashbacks.
Karrabing Film Collective: Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015, 35 mins)
Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*Nt$ blends Indigenous storytelling with modern worries over environmental degradation and substance abuse in a story about a group of young Indigenous men hiding in a chemically contaminated swamp after being falsely accused of stealing some beer, while all around them miners pollute their land.
Image credit: The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, dir. Karrabing Film Collective, 2018