Windjarrameru, the Stealing C*nt$

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.

In the Karrabing Film Collective’s They Been Jealous, riots in indigenous Australia correlate with the accumulative possession of traditional lands by the settler state. Karrabing members consider the character of contemporary jealousy, while also remapping indigenous terrains through both social and mythic modes that structure forms of difference and obligation.

One of the Karrabing's most stirring and direct films, Day in the Life (also screening as part of the Frameworks programme) depicts obstacles encountered across four points of their day. A multilayered hip-hop soundscape sees helpless statements by white media make way for the Karrabing's ultimately empowering words of resistance.

The Jealous One unfolds along two plot lines that meet in a dramatic final encounter: the first, a story of an Indigenous man weaving through bureaucratic red tape to get to a mortuary service on his ancestral land; and the second, a fight between a husband consumed by jealousy and his wife’s brother, who excludes him from community ceremonies.

The Family (A Zombie Movie) opens with future ancestors digging yams and their children playing...but then turn to their elders and ask, "where did we come from?" One kid howls in the background, pretending to be a dingo. A zombie emerges slowly from behind a log, its skin crusted with an oozing white substance, extending a clawed arm toward the children; when they notice, the figure quickly recoils. The children laugh and continue to play, before following the creature to its lair of rusted cars, plastic debris and tarnished woodland. By the end of the film, they’ve killed the monster. What opened as a fairly innocent scene has turned into a commentary on the toxic dangers of unbridled Western consumption.

At the end of the world, only Indigenous people can survive the toxic landscape so the white fellas steal ‘mud children’ to experiment on in the hopes of finding a cure. One such mud child, Aiden now returns to his ancestral lands, where the mermaids were meant to protect him. But the mermaids are being targeted too.

Night Time Go is an exploration of the Australian settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War, and the refusal of the Karrabing ancestors to be detained. The film begins by hewing closely to the actual historical details of a group that escaped from an internment camp in 1943, but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection that drives out settlers from the Top End of Australia.

Across a series of increasingly surreal flashbacks, an extended Indigenous family argues about what caused their boat’s motor to breakdown and leave them stranded. As they consider the causal roles played by ancestral spirits, the regulatory state and the Christian faith, the film makes manifest the multiple demands and inescapable vortexes of contemporary Indigenous life.