Growing out of Rolf de Heer’s film, Charlie’s Country, de Heer and Molly Reynolds’ Country suite is comprised of three interlinked works: Charlie’s Country, Reynolds’ documentary, Another Country, and the online installation, Still Our Country. The three have never been exhibited together, but that will change when a limited season begins at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image on July 3, running until July 7, during NAIDOC week.
All three projects were shot in the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Community of Ramingining – the home of acclaimed actor David Gulpilil – and together paint a vivid picture of modern Indigenous community life.
In Another Country, legendary Australian aboriginal actor David Gulpilil (Walkabout, Storm Boy, Crocodile Dundee, Australia, Rabbit Proof Fence, The Tracker) tells the tale of when his people’s thousands-of-years-old way of life was interrupted by a new culture. This documentary film speaks to the havoc caused by superimposing a new culture over an old culture and the consequent clashes with all manner of things, such as time, money, garbage and errant kangaroos.
With evocative and experientially cinematic visuals and sound, Still Our Country documents the swiftly morphing lives of the Yolngu people of Ramingining in the Northern Territory. This online installation (which can also screen theatrically) is built on fragments and parts presenting a carnival of contemporary ways, the sum of which makes for a bold declaration of identity and a hopeful promise of a future.
Written by Rolf de Heer and David Gulpilil as a collaborative project, Charlie’s Country stars Gulpilil as blackfella Charlie, who is getting older, and is out of sorts. The government’s intervention is making life more difficult on his remote community, what with the proper policing of whitefella laws that don’t generally make much sense, and Charlie’s kin seeming more interested in going along with things than doing anything about it. So Charlie takes off, to live the old way, but in doing so sets off a chain of events in his life that has him return to his community chastened, and somewhat the wiser.
For more information, go to the ACMI website.
