Karrabing Film Collective

Cinetracts '20

Želimir Žilnik, Sheilah ReStack

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.

Windjarrameru, the Stealing C*nt$

Karrabing Film Collective

As miners steal and pollute the ground underneath them, a group of young Indigenous men are chased by police for allegedly stealing two cartons of beer.

Day in the Life

Karrabing Film Collective

One of the Karrabing's most stirring and direct films, Day in the Life (also screening as part of the Frameworks programme) depicts obstacles encountered across four points of their day. A multilayered hip-hop soundscape sees helpless statements by white media make way for the Karrabing's ultimately empowering words of resistance.

They Been Jealous

Karrabing Film Collective

In the Karrabing Film Collective’s They Been Jealous, riots in indigenous Australia correlate with the accumulative possession of traditional lands by the settler state. Karrabing members consider the character of contemporary jealousy, while also remapping indigenous terrains through both social and mythic modes that structure forms of difference and obligation.

The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland

Karrabing Film Collective

At the end of the world, only Indigenous people can survive the toxic landscape so the white fellas steal ‘mud children’ to experiment on in the hopes of finding a cure. One such mud child, Aiden now returns to his ancestral lands, where the mermaids were meant to protect him. But the mermaids are being targeted too.

Night Time Go

Karrabing Film Collective

Night Time Go is an exploration of the Australian settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War, and the refusal of the Karrabing ancestors to be detained. The film begins by hewing closely to the actual historical details of a group that escaped from an internment camp in 1943, but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection that drives out settlers from the Top End of Australia.

Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams

Karrabing Film Collective

Across a series of increasingly surreal flashbacks, an extended Indigenous family argues about what caused their boat’s motor to breakdown and leave them stranded. As they consider the causal roles played by ancestral spirits, the regulatory state and the Christian faith, the film makes manifest the multiple demands and inescapable vortexes of contemporary Indigenous life.

The Jealous One

Karrabing Film Collective

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

The Jealous One unfolds along two plot lines that meet in a dramatic final encounter: the first, a story of an Indigenous man weaving through bureaucratic red tape to get to a mortuary service on his ancestral land; and the second, a fight between a husband consumed by jealousy and his wife’s brother, who excludes him from community ceremonies.