Kanopy (Firm)
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Sons of Namatjira examines the relationship between a community of Aboriginal artists and the outside world. Keith Namatjira is the son of the celebrated artist Albert Namatjira, and emulates his father's distinctive style. He lives with his family in the same camp that his father had established on the outskirts of Alice Springs in Central Australia. One of Curtis Levy's finest documentaries, Sons of Namatjira, follows Keith and his wife, Isabel,...
2) Yolngu boy
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Lorrpu, Botj and Milika are three Yolngu (Aboriginal) teenagers who once shared a childhood dream of becoming great hunters together. But as teenagers they changed: Botj did bad things which landed him in jail one time, and Milika is more interested in being a good football player and in chicks! Only Lorrpu is still closer to Aboriginal traditions and to their common dream. One night Botj goes too far and he's about to return to jail. Lorrpu must...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
On 21 June 2007, the Howard Federal Government introduced the Northern Territory Emergency Response legislation commonly known as 'The Intervention' - one of the most dramatic policy shifts in Aboriginal affairs in Australia's history. Relentless media attention generally focuses on ideological arguments for or against the Intervention put forward by 'experts' far removed from its everyday realities. Ironically, the voices of those affected by the...
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
In the Aboriginal community of Mt Liebig, about 300km west of Alice Springs, a group of young women talk about the importance of bush food in their culture and its relationship to good health. In contrast, they associate sickness with “takeaway shop food” and describe Alice Springs as a “takeaway town: takeaway food, takeaway grog and takeaway sickness”. The women visit the nearby Irantji waterhole with a group of children to teach them how...
5) Bush toys
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
This whimsical journey into original bush toy creations in the central desert of Australia puts a new slant on the craft of toy making. From the early pastoralist days of colonisation to current international art exhibitions as far afield as New York, we see the inventive adaptation of traditional European-style toys now accepted into modern Aboriginal culture. Made from salvaged materials stripped from car bodies and found amongst discarded refuse...
Series
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
Without narration, and without identification of individual speakers, the film provides an invaluable record of two events which occurred in the final week of January 1977, and which marked “a turning point in legal recognition of Aboriginal rights to land”. The film documents discussions among traditional owners and white officials and legal advisors, at a large gathering at Batchelor, 100km south of Darwin. The first event was the meeting of...
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
This impassioned documentary was rejected for broadcast by ABC TV as “biased” and lacking “balance”. John Howard introduced the Intervention legislation in July 2007. Two years later, an official United Nations rapporteur on human rights, Professor James Anaya, described the policy as an “extraordinary measure which infringes on the rights and determinations of Indigenous People”. In this film, two Aboriginal spokespersons – Barbara...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
This moving documentary is a record of a few hours in the life of a small 7 year old boy, Ricco, from Hidden Valley, one of the many town camps on the outskirts of Alice Springs. He has lived in the camp for most of his life, and is looked after by his three older sisters and his foster mother, Nanna Maudie. Ricco Japaljarri Martin is bright, cheeky and adventurous. The film follows his interactions with his nine dogs, and on a routine day at school...
Series
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
Opened in 2008, the Arlpwe Arts Centre and Gallery, in the town of Ali Curung, 350 km north of Alice Springs, provides a focus for the work of a diverse range of Indigenous artists. Artists such as Anita Dickson, May Nampijinpa Wilson, Judy Nampijinpa Long, Valerie Nakamarra Nelson and artefact maker Joe Bird, talk about their work as an expression of their link to their Country. Their art also represents a means whereby they can teach younger people...
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Tnorala is the Aboriginal name for Gosse's Bluff, a dramatic meteorite impact crater set in a vast plain 175km west of Alice Springs. This significant dreaming site for Western Arrernte people is steeped in mystery and tragedy. The story of its creation and the events that occurred there are narrated to the camera by Aunty Mavis Malbunka, one of the traditional story-tellers for the place. Legend says that while stars danced in the Milky Way, a child...
11) Boomerang today
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
A delightful observational documentary about the making of a number seven boomerang by four senior traditional men from Yuelamu, west of Alice Springs in central Australia. The men talk about how they were taught by their elders using bush materials, and are now teaching a new generation using some modern tools, to keep traditional law and culture strong. We follow the hunt for the wood, the shaping, the smoothing and the painting of the boomerangs...
12) Art of healing
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
The Saint Teresa Church stands proudly in the Aboriginal community of Ltyentye Apurte, a township of 500 people, 80km south-east of Alice Springs. This is a Catholic Church like no other. Agnes Palmer, an Arrernte woman, grew up in a Catholic Mission and as an adult felt that she had been given a story to tell about God and the Creation. She became a driving force in a project to paint the bare white walls of the community church. In 2002, a professional...
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
A small group of Pintupi living in west Central Australia today can remember their first meeting with a white man, their first impressions of the white man's world and their expectations of what the white world had to offer. Benny and the Dreamers reveals for the first time on film the Australian Aboriginal peoples' version of their first contact with white culture which was to change their traditional way of life forever. For some it was a terrifying...
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Crook Hat and Camphoo are Alyawarra elders, from central Australia, who are concerned about the survival of traditional skills and culture. As Crook Hat says at the beginning of this outstanding film: “We are telling the old peoples way. Its not just our way. We are trying to teach others what we have learnt.” In this film, Crook Hat and Camphoo pass on knowledge and skills relating to the making of spears and spear-throwers (woomeras). The two...
15) Yellow fella
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Yellow Fella is a portrait of Tom E. Lewis who as a young man in 1978 was chosen by director Fred Schepisi to star in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith. The life of the character he played was hauntingly close to his own - a restless young man of mixed heritage, struggling between two cultures to find his own identity. Tom's mother is an Indigenous woman from southern Arnhem Land who was working as a station hand and cook when she met Tom's father, a...
16) Five seasons
Series
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
The Numurindi people have developed a culture where all things past and present, including the weather, are interrelated. This relationship extends to previous generations, together with the animal and plant kingdom. Five Seasons explores this intricate relationship through the eyes of the Numurindi people of South East Arnhemland in the Northern Territories Gulf of Carpentaria. In this region of Australia, western society operates on two distinct...
17) Aeroplane Dance
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
On 1 December 1942, a US bomber called Little Eva was returning to base after a bombing raid over New Guinea. The plane hit a tropical storm and crashed at Moonlight Creek in the southeast corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in Australia's far north. The events that followed were recorded both in the journal of an American survivor and in a spectacular corroboree created by the Yanyuwa people who searched for Little Eva and her crew. Aeroplane Dance...