Worth: $15.00
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Cast:
Calvin Tuteao, Robert Taylor, Tioreore Ngatai Melbourne, Sean Mununggurr, Lisa Flanagan
Intro:
...puts the resilience of Indigenous strength at the forefront of its multiple narratives.
FILMINK ACKNOWLEDGES THIS REVIEW WAS WRITTEN ON WURUNDJERI COUNTRY, AND ACKNOWLEDGES THAT SOVEREIGNTY OF THIS LAND HAS NEVER BEEN CEDED. WE HONOUR AND PAY RESPECT TO ELDERS PAST, PRESENT, AND EMERGING
The purpose of an anthology is to present a variety of stories that differ in form and genre, but ultimately are rooted under a unified framework. Netflix has found great success with this model – each episode of Black Mirror and Love and Death and Robots tackles a new concept, but all entries stay true to an underlying central concern.
We Are Still Here is an expansive anthology film co-produced by Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, which puts the resilience of Indigenous strength at the forefront of its multiple narratives. Colonialism is an ongoing process, and most of the eight stories presented reinforce this notion – colliding and intertwining across both space and time.
Starting with a beautiful semi-digital, semi-rotoscoped animation, a small fisherwoman and her daughter are confronted by a behemoth of colonial power at sea, an empirical ship that is emblematic of the tragedy that would befall the next two and a half centuries (Lured – written and directed by Danielle MacLean). It sets the stage for a multi-generational epic, whose inception was a response to the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s Second Voyage to Australia in 1772. Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific have a history riddled with lies, and this film is a clear response, and an attempt to begin a long and arduous disentanglement.
Whether it be a Samoan trapped in 1915 WW1 fighting a war for land that is not even his own, a climate-riddled dystopia in 2274 where a Māori girl fights to save her grandfather, a First Nations man in the Arrernte lands in 1859 coming face to face with an invader, or even the simplicity of a Mparntwe local trying to buy grog in the contemporary ‘now’ – the stories are multi-temporal, but the message remains universal. It states that it is about ‘1000 years of kinship, loss, grief, and resilience.’ and it most definitely succeeds at driving those perspectives home.
As with all anthologies, not every story soars with the same energy as its counterparts. Certain stories struggle under budget restraints, a sad detraction that sometimes breaks the immersion of the film’s truly revolutionary scope and scale. A particular story, Rebel Art (written and directed by Tracey Rigne), which involves a homeless Naarm girl fighting the invasion day celebrations, really suffers from poor framing in the anthology’s structure – despite it containing one of the most powerful messages: to ‘decolonise the mind’.
We Are Still Here is edited in a non-chronological way and splices up the stories where some are returned to, and some are not. This works thematically at highlighting the flowing and broken nature of the ongoing and generational effects of racism, colonialism, and cultural erasure, but sometimes detracts some stories from clearly delivering their message. The excellent and most powerful story, Grog Shop (written by Samuel Nuggin-Paynter and directed by Beck Cole), successfully delivers hope and solidarity over simply showing pain and suffering, but the story is broken up while other stories tie up around it. This overcomplication distracts from truly focusing on resolving what is a succinct narrative.
The finale, however, is what really solidifies We Are Still Here‘s justification as an anthology. When the camera hurdles between the various Indigenous faces, countries, and cultures that have been ravaged by settler colonialism, it reminds audiences of two simultaneous things: these complexities exist across vast amounts of geography, but never forget that ‘we’ are still here.
