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.
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.” (1)
Natasha Bigfoot, Katrina Lewis-Bigfoot, Rex Edmunds, Cecilia Lewis, Elizabeth A. Povinelli in conversation.
