Politically Engaged Films Against Colonialism

Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$
The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland
23 September 2019, 8:30 PM
A Symbiont screening / Cinema Ponrepo
Czech premiere

Classification

Screening

Venue

Cinema Ponrepo

Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$
2015, 35 min
The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland
2018, 26 min
Conceived and produced by the Karrabing Film Collective
Director: Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Language: English
Australia  

 

Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$

Four young Aboriginal men are holed up in a chemically compromised mangrove swamp having been falsely accused of stealing two cartons of beer, while at the edge of the standoff miners ransack the country.

Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ operates in the realm of docu-fiction and improvisational realism.

The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland

In the not-so distant future, Europeans will no longer be able to survive for long periods outdoors in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism, but Indigenous people seem able to. A young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to “save the white ‘race’,” is released into the world of his family. As he travels with his father and brother over the landscape, he confronts two possible futures and pasts.

The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland is a powerful intervention in contemporary debates about the future present of climate change, extractive capitalism, and industrial toxicity from the point of view of Indigenous worlds.


The Karrabing Film Collective (est. 2008) is an award-winning group of some thirty filmmakers and artists who use their aesthetic practices as a means of self-organization and social analysis. Most Karrabing are Indigenous and live in a rural community in northwestern Australia. In the Emiyengal Indigenous language Karrabing means ‘tide out.’ It refers to a time of coming together, as well as to the coastline that connects the Karrabing Film Collective as an extended family group across social lines.

The director of Karrabing films, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University.

Awards

Karrabing films and installations have been exhibited at Berlinale Forum Expanded; Hallucinations, documenta 14, Athens, and e-flux supercommunity at the Venice Biennale, among others. The expansive retrospective exhibitions were presented at the Tate Modern (2017) and MoMa (2019).



Admission charges for members of Ponrepo:
· CZK 50
· Students, senior citizens, people with disabilities and children under 15: CZK 40

General Admittance
· CZK 80 Kč
· Students, senior citizens, people with disabilities and children under 15: CZK 70


The series of screenings Symbiont: The stories of transforming mutualism was organized in collaboration with Anthropictures and Cinema Ponrepo and has been curated by social anthropologist Pavel Borecký.