Buckskin
Dylan McDonald
2013 | 57 minutes | Australia, Kaurna
US Premiere | Director in Attendance
Two hundred years ago, the Kaurna people occupied much of South Australia, including modern-day Adelaide. They practiced fire-stick farming, believed in communal material ownership, and spoke their own Kaurna language. The 1836 arrival of British colonists set in motion a rapid and thorough displacement and the last surviving full-blood Kaurna, a woman named Ivaritji, died in 1931. Now, a cultural and linguistic revival is underway, thanks to Vincent “Jack” Buckskin, the 2011 Young South Australian of the Year, whose efforts are captured by indigenous filmmaker Dylan McDonald. Buckskin has spent his twenties traveling the country to teach seminars in the Kaurna language, thereby offering hundreds of young people access to their roots and reopening questions of aboriginal identity in urban Australia.Remembering Yayayi
Pip Deveson, Ian Dunlop, and Fred Myers
2014 | 57 min | Australia
US Premiere | Directors in Attendance
In this riveting documentary, charismatic Australian Aboriginal elder Marlene Nampitjinpa reflects on her remarkable history, as she watches rare archival material of her Pintupi childhood from the 1970s, in conversation with anthropologist Fred Myers who she has known since she was a girl . With film footage shot by filmmaker Ian Dunlop at the remote Aboriginal outstation of Yayayi on the cusp of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976, Remembering Yayayi shows the value that such work has for contemporary Indigenous people who have few records of their history.