by Abhi Parasher
When we encourage others to tell their own stories, what does that mean?
Documentary The Last Daughter has a compelling answer. The feature length film recounts Brenda Matthews’ life; an Aboriginal woman who was stolen from her biological family at the age of 2 and placed with a white family. When she is returned to her mother, Matthews has complicated feelings of love for her birth family and a yearning for the warmth she experienced from her white family.
The Last Daughter’s story is an emotionally complex journey of love and longing that could have easily been told from multiple perspectives, each conveying their own sense of what is important.
“Nathaniel Schmidt, the co-director, saw that I had the story and that I was more than capable of telling it because that is something we have been doing for generations in our culture, passing down stories,” shares Matthews today. “So, he asked if I wanted to come on as a co-director. It was really awesome of him to do that.”
Being able to collaborate with Schmidt as a director allowed Matthews to tell her story exactly how she wanted.
“Sometimes, you can feel disconnected from your own story because somebody else is telling it. But for him to put me in that space and share that story with me, him coming at it from the film side and me telling the story as our mob has always been doing, made a wonderful collaboration,” says Matthews.
By having agency over her own story, Matthews also found closure in the grey areas that even she couldn’t quite understand.
“I was stolen at two years old, so I didn’t fully understand my own story,” explains Matthews. “But recreating those scenes and going back through my story not only allowed me to understand what happened to us as children, but also what happened to my family on both sides, black and white.”
That gift of dissecting her own story through a magnifying glass has plenty of value for Matthews, none more so than its impact on her personal life.
“I learnt so much about myself. I didn’t know I was carrying all this hurt and pain inside. I was trying to find my identity and belonging in both homes, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. But by going back over stories, I was able to find my place in both families.”
By bringing Matthews into the filmmaking team as a director, The Last Daughter’s team has given a blueprint for what ‘telling our own stories’ should look like.
The Last Daughter is in cinemas June 15, 2023
