Film Collective Fire, Film and Ancestral Dreaming – Elisabeth Povinelli & Karrabing

Having written on the impasse between liberal systems of law and value, and indigenous worlds in Northern Territory, Australia, Elisabeth Povinelli is a co-founder of the Karrabing Film Collective as a means of collective storytelling and territorial assertion. Consisting of over 50 members, the indigenous media group employ film and art installations as a form of grassroots resistance and self-organisation. Meaning ‘low tide’ in the local Emmiyengal language, karrabing refers to a form of collectivity that exists beyond government-imposed structures of land ownership.

The collective emphasises that the films themselves remain secondary to their ongoing struggle for land recognition. In conversation with Povinelli, we consider how filmmaking as a medium and film spectatorship as a mode of encounter, might contribute to politics of territorial resistance and to a refusal of life as prescribed by neo-capitalist norms. If cinema is a technical apparatus brought forward by colonialism and conditioned by extraction, how might it also—haunted by ghosts from the past—reflect the stories of ancestral beings and enduring connections to land?

The event is a collaborative initiative by the research project Fireplace Cinema of Gawan Fagard (RITCS School of Arts), Level Five Blue Screen and Caillou Film Festival.

Film Program

When the Dogs Talked by Karrabing Film Collective

→ Australia 2014, HD video, 29 min, English & Emmiyengal with English subtitles

The search for a family member at the request of the housing authorities propels an extended family on a journey across land and sea, re-enacting the Dog Dreaming. Songlines are recounted and the children question the meaning of the ancestral Dreaming in their contemporary lives filled with hip-hop and hunting for food.

Day in the Life by Karrabing Film Collective

→ Australia 2020, HD video, 32 min, English & Emmiyengal with English subtitles

Day in the Life explores the ordinary obstacles Indigenous families face as they move through an ordinary day. Across five chapters – Breakfast, Playtime, Lunch Break, Cocktail Hour, and Dinner Time – and an audioscape directed by its younger members, Day in the Life is a visual and sonic landscape that dramatises and satirises the settler forms of governance and extractive capitalism that Karrabing members encounter over the course of a day.

Biography

Elizabeth A. Povinelli (1962) is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Informed by settler colonial theory, pragmatism and critical theory, Povinelli's writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. She is the author of books and essays as well as former editor of the academic journal Public Culture. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1991.

Povinelli is one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective founded in 2010. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, and the Contour Biennale.

This event takes place in the framework of Fireplace Cinema: a Coming Community through Film? A research project on cinema, community and reconfigurations of the economy of empathy in collective film spectatorship by Gawan Fagard (RITCS/ULB) and is co-funded by FUTURE NARRATIVES at RITCS School of Arts.

Level Five Blue Screen is a Brussels-based, bimonthly screening programme focusing on film and video works by visual artists. The program is curated by Emma van der Put, Alasdair Asmussen Doyle and Chloé Malcotti and takes place at the collaborative artists' studio Level Five and at SMOG.

Caillou Film Festival From 26-29 March the second edition of Caillou Film Festival will take place at Mona, curated by Lietje Bauwens and Lea Vromman. The festival explores the strategies used in territorial struggles and the role of cinema in resistance, showcasing activists in all their diversity, highlighting how film can document, influence, and participate in struggles. Alongside screenings, workshops and discussions bring together Brussels-based activists to reflect on past successes and future possibilities.