Opening Night at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image
December 17
Karrabing Film Collective Screenings and Panel Discussion
Karrabing Film Collective is an indigenous media group consisting of over 30 members, bringing together Aboriginal filmmakers from Australia’s Northern Territory. They approach filmmaking as a mode of self-organization and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality. Through the collective’s inventive artistic language, their work challenges historical and contemporary structures of settler power. Most of the members of the collective live in rural Indigenous communities in the outback of Australia with low or no income. The films represent their lives and through the process create bonds with their land while intervening in global images of Indigeneity. International screenings and publications of their work over the last few years have provided opportunities for some members of the collective to obtain passports, allowing them to develop local artistic languages and for audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency.
Conference Plenary Speakers
Laura Rascaroli
Laura Rascaroli is Professor of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, where she lectures on film theory, on documentary, and on European and World Cinema. Her research interests span European and World cinemas; experimental nonfiction, the essay film, and first-person cinemas; artist film and the post-medium moving image; space & film (the filmic city, film & architecture, travel & cinema); and the politics of form. She is the author of The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Wallflower Press, 2009) and How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford University Press, 2017). She has also co-authored research monographs on the postmodern cinematic city, on the European road movie, and on the cinema of Nanni Moretti. Among her edited collections are Antonioni: Centenary Essays (British Film Institute, 2011) and Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). She has delivered about a hundred invited keynotes, lectures and master classes internationally in universities, film festivals and cultural institutes, and has been invited to teach in Cuba, Italy, and Spain. Her work has been translated into languages including Farsi, Chinese, Korean, Czech, Polish, Spanish, and Italian. She is Editor-in-Chief of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.
Christina Milligan
Christina Milligan (Ngati Porou) is Associate Professor, Screen Production and lectures and supervises students in screen production and screenwriting. Her teaching is based on a foundation of many years’ practice in the screen industries of New Zealand and Australia, and she researches in the areas of Indigenous screen practice, screenwriting studies and media industry studies. In her research, she focuses on exploring the work of Maori and other Indigenous filmmakers, with particular interest in the contrasts between the voices of Indigenous filmmakers and their Western counterparts. She is an active member of the international Screenwriting Research Network and has served on its Executive Board. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Screenwriting and peer-reviews for several journals, including Studies in Documentary Film, Journal of Media Practice and Education, and MAI. Christina has recently completed a term as the government-appointed Independent Chair of Te Puna Kairangi, a government initiative supporting the New Zealand screen production sector through Covid-19 by funding high quality productions telling New Zealand stories for global audiences. She has previously served on boards including the New Zealand Film Commission and Nga Aho Whakaari (Maori in Screen) and is currently a board member of New Zealand On Air.
Belinda Smaill
Belinda Smaill is Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. Recently her work has focused on the ethical, cultural and institutional issues that pertain to the presentation of the environment and biodiversity on screen. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010), Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (2016) and co-author of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013). She has also published widely in international journals including Screen, JCMS and Camera Obscura. She is currently the lead investigator on the Australian Research Council funded project, “Remaking the Australian Environment Through Documentary Film and Television.” This research explores the role of screen culture in environmental change and its legacies.
Margot Nash
Margot Nash is a New Zealand-born Australian-based filmmaker. Her directing credits include the award-winning feature dramas Vacant Possession (1994) and Call Me Mum (2005), the experimental short Shadow Panic (1989), the feature documentary The Silences (2015) and the recent Undercurrents: Meditations on Power(2023 which will screen at the conference. She was a co-filmmaker and editor on the landmark feminist films We Aim To Please (Robin Laurie, Margot Nash1976) and For Love Or Money (Megan McMurchy, Margot Nash, Margot Oliver, Jeni Thornley 1983). Margot has worked as a consultant and mentor for Australian Indigenous filmmakers as well as working in the Pacific running documentary workshops for Pacific Island women television producers. In 2016 she won an Australian Writers’ Guild AWGIE Award for the screenplay of The Silences. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in Communications at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Jeni Thornley
Jeni Thornley is a documentary filmmaker, writer, film valuer and Visiting Scholar, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). In her early career, she was a member of the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative and the Sydney Women’s Film Group (SWFG), one of the first Australian groups to establish itself in the name of “Women’s Liberation”. Thornley’s documentary films include Maidens (1978), the collaborative feature For Love or Money (1983), To the Other Shore (1996), Island Home Country (2008) and more recently Memory Film: a Filmmaker’s Diary (2023) which will screen at the conference. Thornley was Manager of the Women’s Film Fund and Documentary Project Coordinator at the Australian Film Commission during the 1980s. She lectured in documentary at UTS from 2002-2013 and completed her doctorate. She traces her passion in film to her father’s family – film exhibitors across Australia during the 1920s-1960s. Thornley is also a Film Valuer for the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, writes about film regularly and is distributing Memory Film with Antidote Films.
Catherine Dwyer
Catherine Dwyer is the writer and director of the acclaimed documentary, Brazen Hussies (2020): a deep dive into the history of the Australian Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s and an archive producer and has recently worked on Trailblazers (2024), Her Name is Nanny Nellie, (2024), Queerstralia (2023), Who The Bloody Hell Are We? (2023), and The People’s Republic of Mallacoota (2022). Brazen Hussies was listed in The Guardian’s top 10 Australian films of 2020. It won first prize in the human rights category at the 2022 Deauville Green Awards, France and was also nominated for the 2021 AIDC and AACTA Awards for ‘Best Feature Documentary’ and in 2022 for its one-hour TV version. Catherine was nominated for the 2021 Directors Guild Award: ‘Best Direction – Documentary Feature’ and the 2022 AACTA Award for Best Direction in TV – Factual/ Documentary. Brazen Hussies will screen at the conference.
Felicity Collins
Felicity Collins is Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Culture. She has published widely on feminist filmmaking and history, memory and the politics of reconciliation in Australian screen culture. She is the author of The Films of Gillian Armstrong (1999); Australian Cinema After Mabo (2004, with Therese Davis); and editor with Jane Landman and Susan Bye of A Companion to Australian Cinema (2019). She is currently writing a sole-authored book on remapping country through the Blak Wave of television drama series, from Redfern Now to Total Control.
