Do you believe in your mother’s Dreaming? Or do you think machines made those holes?

This screening presents the first two films made by the Karrabing Film Collective, a self-organised Indigenous grassroots media group. These films form part of the collective’s Intervention Trilogy, which blends Indigenous storytelling with plot lines that manifest the contemporary social realities of life in Australia’s Northern Territory. Using humour to approach the incongruities of Indigenous traditions with the strictures of the modern settler state, these films touch on issues of racialised poverty, Indigenous incarceration, illegal mining and environmental degradation.

Youth play a significant role in these films. In When the Dogs Talked, children struggle to find the relevance of Dreaming – a term used to represent a ‘time out of time’ when the land was inhabited with ancestral, often supernatural, figures – within the context of their lives, which are informed by Western concepts of evolution, the soundscapes of hip hop and modern technology. In Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$, teenaged boys fall into a trap presumably set to get them jailed for a minor offence, and have tricks played on them by ancestral spirits when they hide out in a toxic mangrove to evade this fate.

The screening is followed by a Q&A with members of the Karrabing Film Collective.

When the Dogs Talked, Australia 2014, digital video, colour, sound, 34 min

An extended Indigenous family attempts to track down a missing family member to avoid losing their government-subsidised housing. As they move back and forth between their suburban ghetto and a remote site on which they are trying to establish an outstation, they run up against the everyday obstacles of structural and racialised poverty.

Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$, Australia 2015, digital video, colour, sound, 37 min

A group of young Indigenous men hide from police in a chemically contaminated swamp after being falsely accused of stealing beer. The boys’ parents worry that they’ll be harmed if they remain in the toxic swamp and incarcerated if they emerge. All the while corrupt miners illicitly sample ore deposits on the community’s ancestral land. The film asks which entity might rightfully be considered ‘the stealing c*nt$’?