Karrabing Film Collective

Karrabing Film Collective, an Indigenous media group based in Australia’s Northern Territory, uses filmmaking and installation as a form of grassroots resistance and self-organisation. The collective includes approximately 30 members –predominantly living in the Belyuen community – who create films and accompanying art installations together using an “improvisational realism” that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Meaning “low tide” in the Emmiyengal language, “karrabing” refers to a form of collective outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership. Shot on handheld cameras and phones, most of Karrabing’s films dramatise and satirise the daily scenarios and obstacles that collective members face in their various interactions with corporate and state entities. Composing webs of nonlinear narratives that touch on cultural memory, place and ancestry by freely jumping in time and place, Karrabing exposes and intervenes into the longstanding facets of colonial violence that impact members directly, such as environmental devastation, land restrictions and economic exploitation. The Karrabing Film Collective has presented its work at IMA Brisbane; MoMA-PS1, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen, Berlin; Jakarta Biennale; Centre Pompidou, Paris; e-flux, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Tate Modern, London; Documenta 14, Kassel; the Melbourne International Film Festival; Berlinale, Forum Expanded; and Biennale of Sydney; Center for Contemporary Arts, Shanghai among others. They have received numerous prizes and commissions including 2021 Eye Award, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; 2020 Special Mention, Film Victoria Erwin Rado Award for Best Australian Short Film for “Day in the Life”, MIFF; 2015 Visible Award; and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival.