Karrabing Film Collective

Karrabing Film Collective was established in 2013 by a group of filmmakers and artists, most of whom are indigenous to the lands and coasts along northwestern Australia. The collective includes approximately 30 members that approach filmmaking as a mode of self-organization and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality. Through highly inventive and formally audacious cinema language, their work challenges historical and contemporary structures of settler power, carving out a unique space between artists’ film, activism, narrative cinema and grassroots self-representation.

Screened:
SUN 31/10, 17:00 SLOTTS
KORTFILMFESTIVALEN PLAY

NIGHT TIME GO

“Night Time Go” is an exploration of the settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War using truck, train, and rifle and the refusal of the Karrabing ancestors to be detained. The film begins by hewing closely to the actual historical details of this ancestral journey but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection driving out settlers from the Top End of Australia. Mixing drama and humor, history and satire, “Night Time Go” pushes subaltern history beyond the bounds of settler propriety.

Australia 2017 /32:00 / Director: Karrabing Film Collective

THE MERMAIDS, OR AIDEN IN WONDERLAND

In a not-too-distant future, the world is being poisoned and Europeans are unable to step outside, while Indigenous people are able to. Aiden, adopted into a white family, is taken out on a voyage, exploring two possible perspectives. Karrabing Film Collective’s most unnerving film is also its most stylistically experimental.

Australia 2018 / 27:00 / Director: Karrabing Film Collective

DAY IN THE LIFE

One of the Karrabing’s most stirring and direct films, “Day in the Life” 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.

Australia 2020 / 31:42 / Director: Karrabing Film Collective