Sydney Film Festival 2023
An often moving and profound documentary about Australia's ancient and under-acknowledged history.
The film covers a lot of ground - there's many aspects to the Dark Emu story. So much so, that the project would have benefited from being a multi-episode series. The post screening talk revealed that this was considered during the project's genesis. But, the counter argument is that a tight 90-minute runtime might make the film more accessible and digestible.
What Uncle Bruce Pascoe's book and, now, this aesthetically beautiful doco has drawn our attention to, is the nuances and complexities of First Nations peoples, structures economical, agricultural and spiritual, were crushed by colonisers.
Clarke respectfully gives airtime to the counter arguments to Pascoe's controversial research which, from what the doco presents, largely boil down to semantics and straw man arguments.
This doco is hopefully a conversation starter. It will hopefully receive distribution that allows many Australians and overseas audiences to see it, as the screening was very much "preaching to the converted".
It seems tragic that we have so many ancient and constructed landmarks - that out-date that of Stone Henge, the Aztecs etcetera - that are not celebrated by us as a nation. You'd think this would appeal to our parochialism, but instead we ignore their age and significance in the name of politics, historical denial and colonial public relations.
Well done to everyone that worked on this project.
