KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE; LENTINI, Damian (ed.)
Wonderland – A Reader

“Our films are neither fiction nor nonfiction. They come from and return to our ancestral lands. They emerge from and sink back into the lives we are actually liv- ing with our durlg (dreamings).”

Karrabing Film Collective is a grassroots Indigenous film and arts group founded in 2007 and currently based in the Top End of Australia’s Northern Territory. The Collective’s films have been presented in exhibitions and at festivals including the 8th Contour Biennale (2017), the 67th International Film Festival Berlin—Berlinale (2017), documenta 14 (2017), and the Sydney Biennial (2016). The group currently numbers around fifty members, who see their collective creative practice as a form of self-organization and social analysis. Artistic languages are developed on the local level, which in turn let the audience understand new forms of collective indigenous agency. The films, whose style is labeled as “improvisational realism,” seek to open a space beyond the binaries of fiction and documentary or past and present.

The extensive reader comprises essays, interviews, various forms of creative writing and polemics to offer insight into the Collective’s singular social, cultural, and historical environment and oeuvre. With a foreword by Andrea Lissoni and a curatorial essay by Damian Lentini, the reader also includes contributions from Richard Bell, Kirsty Howey, May Adadol Ingawanij, Tess Lea, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Matariki Williams, and Vivian Ziherl. [publishers’ note]

Published by Distanz, 2023
Monographs / Postcolonial Studies / Film & Video