Starring: Elijah-Jade Bowen, Deborah Brown, Evander Brown, Lisa Flanagan, Natassia Gorey Furber, Audrey Martin, Leonard Mathews, Sean Mununggurr, Clarence Ryan, Robert Taylor, Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne
Distributor: Bonsai Films
Runtime: 82 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2023
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Eight Indigenous stories from New Zealand and Australia. The strong and defiant stories span the time since Captain Cook’s arrival, through to central Australia in the 19th century, Maori Wars, Gallipoli and current race issues.
A strong title. A defiant title. And, as we would expect, a strong, defiant film. It opens with an animated story, two women fishing, the 18th century, then suddenly out of the waves, the flags of Britannia, Captain Cook’s ship . . . And the waves overwhelming. The film progresses from here from, eight short stories interwoven, not straightforwardly told one after the other, eliciting emotions, stories of Maori tribes and fight back, defeats, tales of Aboriginal men and women, trekking through the desert in the 19th century, a lone soldier in the trenches at Gallipoli, protests on graffiti writing, the burning down of Captain Cook’s house in Fitzroy Gardens, and police oppression as Aboriginal men try to buy alcohol in the Northern Territory Foodtowns. And, within this, a leap forward to 2074, post-apocalyptic misery.
This is an Australia/New Zealand co-production, with financial support from both countries and, particularly, Screen Australia and finance from most of the states and the Northern Territory. All the writers are indigenous and most of them have directed their screenplays. As might be expected, the impact of each story is different from the other. But it is the cumulative effect of the interweaving of the stories, protagonists becoming angrier, the audience also becoming angrier on their behalf, always challenged.
Which means then that the audience is invited to think back over the last 250 years, to Captain Cook and the issue of terra nullius and some of the ironies of Captain Cook’s cottage transported to Melbourne, a tourist site. We see the hostile attitudes of the whites in central Australia in the 19th century, the automatic aggression towards Indigenous. We see Maori communities and individuals, on the war path, at local meetings to decide whether to fight the British or try to live at one with the newcomers to New Zealand.
Particularly moving, with a touch of the comic, is the lone soldier in Gallipoli, abandoned in the trenches, starving, ill, when a bag is suddenly thrown in over the barricade by a Turk, food, clothes, and the soldier tosses his clothes across leading to an amicable meeting, each in their opposite uniforms as they have to hasten back as hostilities resume.
There is passion in the Melbourne scene, paintings of Lives Matter, graffiti, some tranquillity in Fitzroy Gardens, fascist groups and brutality, rebellion. And there is a sense of frustration not only for Ken, who is featured, but for the audience watching as Ken buys alcohol, day after day, accosted by the local police, quoting law and regulations to cover inherent racism. Interestingly, the last we see of Ken is his walking away, laughing in the face of such oppression.
There is a summary of the stories and faces at the end, to remind the audience: We Are Still Here.
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