Elizabeth Povinelli

Night Fishing with Ancestors

Different encounters as experienced by the indigenous population of Australia’s Northern Territory frame the narrative, enriched by the collective’s approach to filmic ‘world-making’.

The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland

At the end of the world, only Indigenous people can survive the toxic landscape so the white fellas steal ‘mud children’ to experiment on in the hopes of finding a cure. One such mud child, Aiden now returns to his ancestral lands, where the mermaids were meant to protect him. But the mermaids are being targeted too.

Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams

Across a series of increasingly surreal flashbacks, an extended Indigenous family argues about what caused their boat’s motor to breakdown and leave them stranded. As they consider the causal roles played by ancestral spirits, the regulatory state and the Christian faith, the film makes manifest the multiple demands and inescapable vortexes of contemporary Indigenous life.

The Jealous One

The Jealous One unfolds along two plot lines that meet in a dramatic final encounter: the first, a story of an Indigenous man weaving through bureaucratic red tape to get to a mortuary service on his ancestral land; and the second, a fight between a husband consumed by jealousy and his wife’s brother, who excludes him from community ceremonies.

Ngupelngamarrunu, Night Time Go

Night Time Go is an exploration of the Australian settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War, and the refusal of the Karrabing ancestors to be detained. The film begins by hewing closely to the actual historical details of a group that escaped from an internment camp in 1943, but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection that drives out settlers from the Top End of Australia.

Windjarrameru, the Stealing C*nt$

As miners steal and pollute the ground underneath them, a group of young Indigenous men are chased by police for allegedly stealing two cartons of beer.

When the Dogs Talked

As a group of Indigenous adults argue about whether to save their government housing or their sacred landscape, their children struggle to decide how the ancestral Dreaming makes sense in their contemporary lives. Listening to music on their ipods, walking though bush lands, and boating across seas, they follow their parents on a journey to reenact the travel of the Dog Dreaming. Along the way individuals run out of stamina and boats out of gas, and the children press their parents and each other about why these stories matter and how they make sense in the context of Western understandings of evolution, the soundscapes of hip hop, and the technologies of land development. "When the Dogs Talked" mixes documentary and fiction to produce a thoughtful yet humorous drama about the everyday obstacles of structural and racialized poverty and the dissonance of cultural narratives and social forms. —Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Karrabing! Low Tide Turning

In the Northern Territory of Australia, an extended Aboriginal family attempts to track down a missing family member so as not to lose their government housing.