No storyboard. No script. We make our films from our life and lands for our life and lands.
This artistic manifesto describes the collective’s technique and approach to filmmaking. Working in the tradition of an oral history, the group develops the ideas for its films in a communal and conversational process; most of the footage is recorded on iPhones. Over the years, the Karrabing Film Collective has developed a characteristic film language in which layering and superimposition suggest the multidimensional interweaving of plot strands and reflect the simultaneity of temporal registers in their everyday lives. Just as the “ancestors” are not gone, racism and colonialism, for the Indigenous population, are not in the past.
Divided into six chapters with a total running time of just under twenty-five minutes, the film traces an arc from the era before European colonization, illustrated by the amicable exchange with the neighboring Macassans, across Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770 and the traumatic experiences of the Indigenous population brought on by the ensuing colonialism such as massacres, epidemics, and forced displacement, to past gold and diamond rushes and today’s excessive mining and, in the final scenes, the noticeable effects of climate change.
In Night Fishing with Ancestors, the filmmakers are asking what other history could have been possible if the Europeans had never invaded and if Indigenous people and Macassans had continued to trade foods, stories, and other things. ‘We think that would have been a great history. Unfortunately, the Europeans came and they just keep coming, disaster after disaster. Makes your hair stand on end just thinking about it.”
About Karrabing Film Collective
The Karrabing Film Collective is an intergenerational grassroots media group of around thirty Indigenous filmmakers and Elizabeth Povinelli, who has known and worked with Karrabing members and their parents and grandparents for almost forty years.
Karrabing lands stretch along the coast from across the Darwin harbor to Anson Bay, Northern Territory. Karrabing’s films reflect their multidimensional relationships with each other, their land, their ancestors, and human and more-than-human life. They tell stories of their fraught relations with the Australian government, the lingering effects of white settler capitalism, repression by the police and authorities, and white Australians’ failure to recognize Indigenous ways of life.