Kimberley Traditional Owners question what meaningful negotiation looks like and offer humanising portraits of those at the centre of this battle in Australia’s spectacular north-west corner, which governments aspire to make "the future economic powerhouse of Australia". With the highest percentage of Aboriginal people living on Country in Australia, what will this mean for the Kimberley’s custodians, lands and cultures, and will they survive these pressures?
Waking up in a nightmare before the sunrise of December 30, 2020, the indigenous community of the Tumandok was suddenly surrounded by fear. Panambi features the stories of bright memories of the past and the despair of having now as a mere memory of the future without a trace of justice; how they lived and what they lived for. A decades-long struggle is shot, one in the lens of a mother paralyzed by fear; another from a mother raged and moved by fear—both looking forward to a better tomorrow.
The unusual story of Nose and Tina, 2 people in love. He is employed as a brakeman, she as a sex worker.
At Western Australia’s first Indigenous-run police station, two officers learn language and culture to help them police one of the most remote beats in the world.
Ian Stahlhut's 1992 documentary of Judy Garland's 1964 Australian Tour.
China’s President Xi Jinping is a force to be reckoned with. As leader of the Communist colossus, he commands the world’s attention, but who is China’s strongman and what is his agenda?
The Queensland country town of Warwick was shocked when a flock of sheep was brutally massacred on a local property. They were even more shocked when they discovered the killings were, in fact, a sacrificial offering to Satan. For the first time, John Burdoe, the teenager who started this satanic cult, tells how he planned and executed the bloody ceremony. He also tells how he came close to stabbing one of his followers, a young man who later died in mysterious circumstances.
A resilient crop-farmer endeavours to preserve his land, legacy and way of life in the face of Australia’s ongoing ‘big dry’.
Ningwasum follows two time travellers Miksam and Mingsoma, played by Subin Limbu and Shanta Nepali respectively, in the Himalayas weaving indigenous folk stories, culture, climate change and science fiction.
Directed by nine Indigenous Solomon Island filmmakers, this is both a love letter and lament for the eponymous traditional lands.
A new songline for 21st century Australia - a fresh look at the Cook legend from a First Nations' perspective - the songline tells of connection to country, resistance and survival and features the cheeky, acerbic and heartfelt showman - Steven Oliver and a host of outstanding, political Indigenous singer/songwriters.
In the pinnacle of their Stack Is The New Black national tour, Short Stack play the Sydney Opera House in a sold out mega-show.
In this revealing study of Norval Morrisseau, filmed as he works among the lakes and woodlands of his ancestors, we see a remarkable Indigenous artist who emerged from a life of obscurity in the North American bush to become one of Canada's most renowned painters. Morrisseau the man is much like his paintings: vital and passionate, torn between his Ojibway heritage and the influences of the white man's world.
Anne Hamilton-Byrne was beautiful, charismatic and delusional. She was also incredibly dangerous. Convinced she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, Hamilton-Byrne headed an apocalyptic sect called The Family, which was prominent in Melbourne from the 1960s through to the 1990s. With her husband Bill, she acquired numerous children – some through adoption scams, some born to cult members – and raised them as her own. Isolated from the outside world, the children were dressed in matching outfits, had identical dyed blonde hair, and were allegedly beaten, starved and injected with LSD. Taught that Hamilton-Byrne was both their mother and the messiah, the children were eventually rescued during a police raid in 1987, but their trauma had only just begun.
Many twentieth century European artists, such as Paul Gauguin or Pablo Picasso, were influenced by art brought to Europe from African and Asian colonies. How to frame these Modernist works today when the idea of the primitive in art is problematic?
Amid a severe housing crisis that made international headlines in 2011, the federal government imposed third-party management on the Attawapiskat First Nation. In response, the First Nation’s leadership filed a challenge in federal court, claiming the appointment was unreasonable, contrary to law and harmful to community members. Alanis Obomsawin documents the remarkable judicial review that ensued in April 2012 in this companion work to her feature documentary The People of the Kattawapiskak River.
During the time of the Stolen Generations, thousands upon thousands of Aboriginal girls were taken from their families and pressed into domestic servitude by the Australian Government. They were supposedly employed as servants, but with total control over their movements, wages and living conditions, their lives all too frequently became an inescapable cycle of abuse, rape and enslavement, with consequences that echo powerfully to this day. Recounting the stories of five of these women – Rita, Violet and the three Wenberg sisters – Servant or Slave is a commanding piece of first-person testimony to a dark and unacknowledged corner of Australian history. Shot with admirable craft and humanity by documentarian Steven McGregor (Croker Island Exodus, MIFF 2012), Servant or Slave is a work of great sadness and urgency, bringing to forceful life the human tragedy of Australia's Indigenous history in the unadorned words of those who lived it.