We are delighted to welcome you to a special evening of screenings by the Karrabing Film Collective in conversation with founding member and critical theorist Elizabeth Povinelli.

Having written on the impasse between liberal systems of law and value, and indigenous worlds in Northern Territory, Australia, Elisabeth Povinelli is a co-founder of the Karrabing Film Collective in 2010 as a means of collective storytelling and territorial assertion. Consisting of over 50 members, the indigenous media group employ film and art installations as a form of grassroots resistance and self-organisation. Meaning ‘low tide’ in the local Emmiyengal language, karrabing refers to a form of collectivity that exists beyond government-imposed strictures of land ownership. 

The collective emphasise that the films themselves remain secondary to their ongoing struggle for land recognition. In conversation with Povinelli, we consider how filmmaking as a medium and film spectatorship as a mode of encounter, might contribute to politics of territorial resistance and to a refusal of life as prescribed by neo-capitalist norms. If cinema is a technical apparatus brought forward by colonialism and conditioned by extraction, how might it also—haunted by ghosts from the past—reflect the stories of ancestral beings and enduring connections to land? 

The event is a collaborative initiative by the research project Fireplace Cinema (ritcs), Level Five Blue Screen and Caillou Film Festival.