The Retrospective of Australian Aboriginal Cinema (2015-2023) that we present as part of the Asian Film Festival of Barcelona (2024) brings together nine films made by Australian Aboriginal filmmakers over the last ten years. Its aim is to showcase a cinema that raises questions and suggests the need to immerse ourselves in the history of one of the oldest cultures on the planet. Personal experience and autobiographical narrative, combined with archival footage, provide Aboriginal cinema with firsthand material to address the current circumstances of the Aboriginal population and the recovery of their rights as free citizens. The three films of this retrospective hosted by the Filmoteca de Catalunya are The Last Daughter (2022), Kindred (2023) and Winhanganha (2023).

Aboriginal cinema is primarily characterized by the advocacy nature of its works and the interest of its authors in correcting history and assessing the relationship between Aboriginal communities and colonial power. Ever since James Cook arrived in Australia in 1770, colonial representatives have established the rules of the game. When the British landed in Australia, there were over 400 Aboriginal peoples, communities, groups, and subgroups, many of them with their own languages, and they were considered a living culture and the oldest one on the planet. The term ab-origine (from the origin) has been used in English since the 17th century and in Australia since 1789, a year after the first penal colony arrived in the country. The first disintegration of society, which then consisted of between 300,000 and 750,000 Aboriginal people spread across 250 nations and clans, occurred as a result of smallpox, chickenpox, measles, flu, and tuberculosis epidemics, which wiped out 90% of the Aboriginal population between 1788 and 1790. The term Aboriginal has often been replaced by First Nations, probably as an attempt to redeem the Aboriginal cause and demonstrate the social integration of those citizens who, until 1962, did not have the right to vote simply because they belonged to an Aboriginal community. It is important to remember that the principle of Terra Nullius marked the beginning of a colonial system based on the occupation of “nobody’s land,” where the natives became victims of the worst injustices. The Aboriginal claim for the lands stolen by the settlers has been ongoing since the 1970s. However, the property and occupation rights granted by the Terra Nullius to the colonizers in 1778 were not repealed until 1992.

The little-known Aboriginal cinema has a prominent place in this edition of the AFFBCN, where we have tried to prioritize in our annual retrospective a culture that is closely linked to landscapes shaped by a history of resilience against colonial power and coloniality. Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) was the great introducer of these landscapes to the West with The Songlines. The book, published in 1989, remains a manifesto of the fascination experienced by this writer and traveler, whose testimony unfolds in a poetic and autobiographical narrative that defends the territorial rights of the bearers of a culture whose identity cannot be denied, instead demanding the restitution of their rights. The literature of explorers who have undertaken expeditions into the Australian desert, such as The Bindibu Expedition, whose testimonies were recorded in The Geographical Journal, vol 128, in March 1962, has been very useful in disseminating the history of lost tribes that, in the age of electronic and digital civilization, still lack real contact with today’s society. The Lizard Eaters by Douglas Stockwood, a member of the expedition, is one of the testimonies included in this publication, informing about the extreme weather conditions of the desert, where some of the oldest tribes still live. Literature and cinema complement each other, and with this Aboriginal Cinema Retrospective, we want to offer our audiences the opportunity to get to know one of the world’s oldest cultures. Largely silenced until the end of the last century and having survived adversity and attempts by hegemonic colonial power to eradicate it, this culture’s resurgence also finds in cinema a means of communication that rivals literature, and like literature, a way of highlighting its cultural identity.