Tate Film’s retrospective of the works of Karrabing Film Collective opens with the UK premieres of two new works by the grassroots media group, presented with 2016’s Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams. Wutharr forms part of the collective’s Intervention Trilogy, along with the two films screening in the Do you believe in your mother’s Dreaming? Or do you think machines made those holes? programme. The trilogy uses a fresh and often playful approach to evoking the multiple traditions informing daily life in Indigenous communities in Australia’s Northern Territory and the forms of oppression that have been intensified in these communities since the 2007 instatement of the National Emergency Response Intervention.
Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams’ movement through alternative accounts of the cause of a boat’s malfunction establishes the central role of storytelling in Karrabing’s films. This carries through in The Jealous One, a retelling of a traditional story that connects the lands of the Karrabing, and in Night Time Go, a telling of an alternative history.
Programme
Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams, Australia 2016, digital video, colour, sound, 29 min
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, Australia 2017, digital video, colour, sound, 29 min
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.
Night Time Go, Australia 2017, digital video, colour, sound, 30 min
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.
The screening is followed by a discussion with seven members of the Karrabing Film Collective.
Karrabing Film Collective The Jealous One 2017, film still. Courtesy the artists
Karrabing Film Collective Night Time Go 2017, film still. Courtesy the artists