by Dov Kornits
“One of the most frustrating things about human beings is that we are always capable,” says Imagine co-director Jack Manning Bancroft when we ask about his mission to improve the world that we live in, and the forces working against us. “It’s actually hardwired into us, the ability to do the work, to be transformative, to be kind, and to be cruel and to be fearful and to be depressed… And that can flip in a switch. I think if human life ends and the variety of the lives of all the other species, and we keep pushing the planetary connection out of balance because we were distracted, then we deserve it. We’re just lemmings wandering towards a distracted dystopia.”
Co-director of Imagine, founder of AIME Mentoring, established to alleviate inequality, and all-around force of nature, Jack Manning Bancroft doesn’t mince words. He’s on a mission to make a difference to the world, to Indigenous youth like he once was, and youth in general, and he has many influential supporters in Australia and around the world.
Crucial to today’s conversation is his relationship with Tyson Yunkaporta, who co-directs Imagine, the first feature length animation by Indigenous filmmakers.
“Tyson had written a critique of AIME during the pandemic, just saying, ‘I’m not sure what these guys are doing, what this popup stuff is…’” says Manning Bancroft, referring to some of the activations that AIME became famous for, involving music, puppets and Indigenous knowledge. “A couple of our team reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, do you want to come and hang out with us and just see what we’re trying to do.’
“I didn’t understand systems thinking,” admits Manning Bancroft. “I was this crazy person saying, ‘we live in a planet and it’s all interconnected and improving Indigenous lives is important, but we actually have to improve the value of how we all interconnect.’
“My partner, just before I met Tyson, was studying systems,” says Manning Bancroft, referring to actress Yael Stone. “She said, ‘I think you’d like this stuff.’ And then I met Tyson, and I was like, ‘oh cool, I’m not crazy.’ We’ve had a really good time fusing together Indigenous people and other people, looking at our systems and our design. Alongside three other people as a core group, we set up the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab out of Deakin Uni, the first one of those in the world, and it’s bringing Indigenous knowledges to the start of the design queue; it’s like an oral research project for Tyson alongside Sand Talk and the other publications that he’s done.
“Tyson is fun, you can’t box him, and I want that for every person in the world. Have your identity, have your space, but also be able to explore. He’s got this really strong Indigenous knowledge and strong efficacy and then he can play in the western world of research and write books and then he loves Conan the Barbarian! It’s nice to feel that freedom to not have to say ‘deadly’ 25 times to signify your Aboriginality, that you can have complexity, depth and nuance.”
Imagine is crucial to Manning Bancroft’s mission for change. “I do think that this film lands as a text that can sit with policymakers, can sit with their children, can bring Indigenous communities together with people that might’ve voted differently in a referendum. It is a very interesting tool, and I’m really interested to see how it moves through the world and in Australia, but also internationally, how people respond to some of the deeper thinking that I think we need to be engaging with if we’re going to try and solve some of these challenges that are in front of us.”
Creating the animation through Unreal Engine, Imagine follows a social media disillusioned young teen and a mysterious talking dog (voiced by Tyson) as they travel through various parallel universes to uncover the meaning of life.
One of the most astounding aspects of Imagine is that the screenplay is co-created by the likes of Wesley Enoch, Malcolm Turnbull, Wayne Blair, Meyne Wyatt, Cloudy Rhodes, Ndileka Mandella (granddaughter of), Bec Bignall, Taika Waititi and many other influential thinkers, with a large part of the narrative made up of podcast recordings.
“We had this script sitting for a while, we thought maybe it was puppets for a while, so we’re exploring whether our puppets were able to bring this film to life, and it was finding The Midnight Gospel, which gave us a frame,” he says about the cult Netflix animation that used podcast recordings as its underlying text.
“I’ve always been trying to work out how you can move people,” says Manning Bancroft, who reckons that Imagine is the first of 3 feature films that AIME plans to make, along with a TV show, and likens the exercise to Sesame Street’s educational MO. “If we could create something as powerful as Shawshank Redemption, then you have a chance to cut through with knowledge in a really deep way.
“I think every now and again we have some stories that allow us to watch them together across generations and demographics. I do think that this one does that. A12-year-old can sit with their Prime Minister dad and they can meet in the middle, and I think that it reaches that expanse. I think it reaches a kid feeling anxious, which is almost every kid plugged into the tech world. I think in Australia there’s a bunch of people who voted yes in a referendum who don’t know what to do next. I think this film will be really helpful for them to watch. I think there’s also a lot of people who voted no, who also don’t know what to do next, who do want to see things improve or want to understand what’s next.
“I think there are rebuilds, but it requires work. A film can arrest attention. We made this as much for the cinemas and festivals as taking it to sit down with King Charles and have a conversation and just be like, ‘can we stop for a second? Can we just think about how we could move differently?’ And if we explore all the options on the table and we choose the path that we’re on, then that’s cool. We made that choice. But I think that we’re unwillingly in a spiral of dissent, many of us have given up our privacy, given up our freedom of decision making, given up our capabilities to be able to engage autonomously and to understand our direction and we’re spiralling out of control.
“I don’t think that every individual citizen understands how much we’ve given up. I think there are spaces and places that we can actually stop and say, ‘no, hang on a minute. You don’t get all the information about me as a human being, or actually outside my window does matter or the people in the place that I live in do matter.’
“There’s an honesty in this text that we’ve helped shepherd, well at the very least we can pause people to stop, but I really hope we move differently. I do believe in us. I think if we stop believing in us, then that’s what happens. We’re very good at the brat inside of all of us, who is playing to the ‘alright, we’re going to be filled with the lowest expectations, we’ll fulfil it’, but we can do extraordinary things if we reach for that. I hope that we can do that.”
Imagine screens around Australia on 26 January 2026, more information here.
Main photo by Benjamin Knight
