As RGFF23 guests of honour, Angelina Lewis, Sandra Yarrowin and Linda Yarrowin will be on hand to present three concurrent screenings of their internationally acclaimed masterpiece Day in the Life (2020), followed by a Q&A in Cinema 8.
Karrabing Film Collective are an Indigenous media group who use filmmaking to interrogate the conditions of inequality for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory and to retain connections to land and their Ancestors. Composed of more than 30 extended family members – whose ancestral lands stretch across saltwaters and inlands and the Italian Alps – Karrabing creates films using an ‘improvisational realism’ that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Filmmaking provides a means of self-organisation and social analysis for the Karrabing. Screenings and publications allow the Karrabing to develop local artistic languages and forms and allow audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency.
Their film Day in the Life charts an ordinary day in a small rural Indigenous community in which nothing quite works and the authoritative hand of the government is an always constant, shadowy presence over the community. The film comprises five satirically titled vignettes —“Breakfast,” “Play Break,” “Lunch Run,” “Cocktail Hour,” “Takeout Dinner”— illustrating the ways in which the community’s everyday lives are shaped by external influences and constraints and by their insistence on going forward with the ancestors.
Day in the Life has screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2020, with support from “Artists in Cinema” Commission & Projections, and received a Special Mention, Film Victoria Erwin Rado Award for Best Australian Short Film, Melbourne International Film Festival in 2020. The Karrabing Film Collective were recipients of the prestigious Eye Film & Art Prize in 2021, and have had their work featured at some of the most prestigious art and film institutions throughout the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA PS1) in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Palais de Tokyo, dOCUMENTA 14, Serpentine Galleries, Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW, Carriageworks (The National, 2021), the Samstag Museum, Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) for the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9).
Other Karrabing Film Collective films include The Mermaids of Aiden in Wonderland (2018), The Jealous One (2018), Night Time Go (2017), Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016), Windjarrameru, The Stealing C * nt $ (2015), When the Dogs Talked (2014) and Karrabing! Low Tide Turning (2012).
From RGFF Festival Director Chris Luscri: “It is an absolute honour to be able to host Angie, Linda and Sandra to the festival this year, as to screen their incredible work Day in the Life. As a festival that puts the onus on spotlighting some of the most exciting and innovative new voices in Australian film, it is inconceivable that we could host such a festival without recognising the extraordinary achievements of the Collective. Karrabing’s work has been celebrated internationally, yet requires persistent and passionate advocacy at home. These efforts are both timely and necessarily ongoing, especially important in broadening the dialogue and visibility around Australia’s First Nations filmmakers to include such voices as Karrabing’s, which are producing wildly innovative and urgent work the likes of which we have never before seen in this country, and thus sit outside traditional industry pathways. ReelGood wishes to acknowledge the efforts of a cohort of people across the film & arts industries, in particular Michelle Carey of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), Erica Green & Gillian Brown of The Samstag Museum, Abigail Moncrieff of Carriageworks/The National 2021, for drawing the work of the Karrabing Film Collective to broader audiences within their country of origin.”
Don’t miss this incredible opportunity to view the work of some of this country’s leading First Nations film-makers, this Saturday from 6pm.
