This week, Film Notes publishes a collective conversation with Elizabeth Povinelli of the Karrabing Film Collective, organized in Brussels by Fireplace Cinema, Blue Screen, and Caillou Film Festival and introduced here by Gawan Fagard.1 Povinelli describes how making films brings generations together to sustain their relations to country, keeping ancestral knowledge active amid the ongoing violence of settler colonialism.
Setting the Stage
As one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective in Belyuen, in Australia’s Northern Territory, Elizabeth Povinelli is involved in a precarious form of cinema, manifesting presence and building territorial resistance to settler colonial dynamics. It felt natural to invite her in the context of the ongoing research project Fireplace Cinema: looking closely at how film dreams of community and rethinking a social ecology of film beyond late capitalism’s economy of hypervisibility. We were curious what she would have to say about this speculative genealogy of the moving image as a flame, in which previous generations render themselves present to us, and how storytelling contributes to struggles against the systemic abandonment of racialized communities.
We welcomed Elizabeth in a conversational circle of self-organized film collectives in Brussels: Caillou Film Festival and Blue Screen, which, like Fireplace Cinema, work to nurture spaces for alternative approaches to cinema and the moving image. We were interested in reflecting the collectivity at the heart of the Karrabing Film Collective, foregrounding forms of assembly as part of the event itself. The question we shared through the room was: How do we create imperfect solidarities, from Karrabing’s land claims to the threatened rights of the underclass to live a decent life in Europe’s capital? How does cinema, through its potential to transport images across time and space, carry such solidarity?
Why did the Karrabing Collective turn to film, this medium deeply complicit in the politics of hypervisibility? Why project their weirdly erratic videos widely in the art world? To satisfy the art world’s hunger for the authentic, the untouched, the ancestral, something pure to extract and capitalize on? Instead, they show us hilarious fabulations on neocolonial forms of oppression, layered stories of Indigenous life conditioned by relentless extraction, and attempts to pay tribute to ancestral presence in the everyday landscape. In their cinematic language, developed over nearly fifteen years, layers of video make images think, dream, and act at once.
Who Profits?
This question is always at the core of Karrabing’s economy.2 Research funds from Fireplace Cinema were used to pay screening fees and contribute to Karrabing’s livelihood. Income from donations and dinner was transferred to a collective of un(der)documented Congolese women in Brussels, affirming their presence despite bureaucratic erasure. This is how we collectively try to carve out spaces for solidarity and redistribution of means.
We initially hoped to bring other Karrabing members to Brussels, but the expense and environmental impact led us to reconsider. Elizabeth was already traveling from New York. Her position as a professor at Columbia University affords access to travel funds and institutional support. These privileges raise the question of legitimacy and representation: Who gets to speak, and who is heard? Her resistance to speaking “about” or “for” others rather than “with” or “nearby” them becomes a productive source. By means of theory, she takes up the task of an affirmative sabotage of enlightened white supremacism. In Karrabing films, Elizabeth makes herself suspect and often performs caricatures of white saviorism. She sighs while we take the tram from her hotel to the venue:
How many times I’ve been sitting at a table with white people only willing to listen to me, while Indigenous friends are next to me, talking. I would have wanted to grab their faces and turn their eyes in the direction of those who talk better about the issues that are at stake.
Governments like to talk to people like themselves, in a language like their own. The supposed need for representation recalls Spivak’s analysis of the suppression of the subaltern’s voice. Elizabeth’s account of an economy of abandonment examines how late liberalism excludes racialized subjects while claiming to recognize them.3 How do we undo these violent dynamics and rebuild forms of sociability?
Practice as the Ground of Theory
Throughout her talk, as in her writing, Elizabeth’s thinking developed through interruptions, repetitions, and resistance. How does theory stand with both feet on the ground, in dialogue with fragile social relations? Theory in Elizabeth’s hands has no ontological stance on its own, and concepts do not claim universality in a scattered, scarred world. Karrabing is not her object of study. Its members are her family and friends, and her thinking develops through these relationships, away from academic discipline. Ancestral storytelling is fundamental to this shared practice, rejecting any supremacy of truth, priority of relation, or claim of authenticity.
Advocating for the dignified existence of the marginalized, Elizabeth welcomes the proposal Karrabing has for Western theory and thereby effectively unnerves the hegemony of cultural dynamics beyond discrepancies in language, in reference, and in tense. Her “practice of theory” is then one of refusal and withdrawal, of listening attentively to those voices without translation or guidance.
Reversing Cinematic Extractivism
What does cinema have to do with this dynamic? Its material history is entangled with capitalist extraction and colonial ways of seeing. How might filmmaking resist these conditions without reproducing their violence?
I like to think of a cinema which evokes an ancestral connection to fire. Fire appears on our screens as bombs fall, city riots flare up, and wildfires rage, while the audiovisual industry’s own material infrastructure depends on petro-fueled technologies.4 Images accumulate on remote servers, feeding data-mining enterprises and contributing to atmospheric heating, as an audiovisual monoculture increasingly takes hold.5 This global burnout becomes the inconvenient other of the ancestral fireplace. Gathered around a projected image, attending to this unstable mirage, we build a temporary social body, a potential for precarious solidarity with the fleeting presence of bodies appearing on screen. I see in this a possibility of reorienting cinema toward paradigms of indigeneity, away from the settler logic of authorship, intellectual property, and toxic hypervisibility.
Our practice is one of a do-it-yourself cinema, as a hearth for a community gathered on the ground, storytelling and daydreaming, a commoning around that source of light that warms our souls and cooks our food, in coexistence with the potential worlds dreamed by the Karrabing Collective.
Gawan Fagard
Conversation with Elizabeth Povinelli
Question: How did you get involved with the Karrabing?
Elizabeth Povinelli: I was hoping to have Natie (Natasha Bigfoot Lewis) here with us on video, but it’s really early morning down in Belyuen. I met Natie’s grandparents and great-grandparents in 1984. Natie’s mother was still only seven or eight. I had just graduated in philosophy and I had to come up with a project for a liberal arts fellowship in Australia. Ironically, I had recently seen films like The Last Wave, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith at the independent Santa Fe film theater. But I received the grant and traveled to Darwin, then to Belyuen, a small Indigenous community of about 200 people located in the middle of the Cox Peninsula, on the opposite side of Darwin Harbour. I met the parents and grandparents of Karrabing there.
At the end, they asked me: Are you going to be like a white person when you go back? What does it mean being a white person, I wondered. They said, white people come here, they have an experience, and for the rest of their life they talk about it. We agreed this wasn’t great. Instead, they asked me if I would be their lawyer or their anthropologist on a land claim they were involved in. Under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1976), Indigenous people must be represented by a lawyer and an anthropologist when making a land claim. I didn’t want to be a lawyer, and I didn’t know what an anthropologist was. I had no idea about academic disciplines. They said that anthropologists are white people who study Indigenous people. I was a little horrified and said, I don’t want to do that! I loved our conversations, loved how the world unfolded as we did things together. But study them like an object? We laughed.
They needed someone to fulfill the function of an anthropologist but be more like a spy, studying “my kind,” as we said back then. Try to help them figure out how it’s possible that berragut (white people) can say that they want to listen to Indigenous people, but when they explain how they are related to land and each other, the lawyers and anthropologists respond: That’s really interesting, but could you put it in a way that fits the law, even if the law doesn’t fit what you’re saying? So, they wanted me to study white people’s kind of governance. I agreed, and that’s all I’ve ever done.
Q: Karrabing’s territorial struggle became entangled with filmmaking. When the Dogs Talked was made in 2014. What does filmmaking mean for the collective?
EP: What you see in the films is what we do: we make outstations, we engage in legal claims, we raise kids, we go fishing. And then by 2007, most of the elder generation I met in 1984 had passed. The land claims, governed by a settler logic, were dividing Indigenous communities into what the law called “traditional Aboriginal owners” (i.e., the real owners), and people who lived in a place because of colonial interventions. The traditional Aboriginal owners became bosses with significant economic benefits. The irony isn’t lost on us. The disruptions of colonialism were used to disrupt communities. In 2007, in part because of the way Belyuen was disrupted, a riot exploded. The people you see in When the Dogs Talked walked out of the community and became homeless.6
I was in New York at the time. Teaching. They emailed me and said, “We’re out bush,” so I went and found them camping in tents. Having lost their jobs, they knew they might just fall off the side of the cliff. It’s precarious enough being Indigenous. Without housing, it’s life-threatening. What could be done? The self-exiled families were against the logics of divide and conquer through the anthropological imaginary of real (traditional) and historical (affected by colonialism) Indigenous practices. But they also knew that they had to house and feed themselves.
One rotten day, we were pondering hanging ourselves. Instead, we decided to go out hunting. Getting out bush, looking for something, always makes everybody feel possibilities. When we came back to camp, Linda Yarrowin said: You know what, we should make a little film about how we keep going, even though there’s absolutely nothing in the world that supports us! Everybody liked the idea. The question then became: How do we do that? I said that I know that anthropologists buy cameras and give them to the people, so they can make their films. But everyone said no! They wanted me to find a “proper” filmmaker (“You must know somebody in New York”) because they wanted someone who knows how to do it, so they could study and then do what they wanted. That’s what happened.
Q: How would you define your position within the Karrabing Film Collective and how is it perceived?
EP: For some people it’s hard to understand. There is this white lady. She’s American (and now Italian), and everybody else is Indigenous. White audiences first thought these were my films, that I was moving into ethnographic cinema. We told them that their parents and grandparents made me an anthropologist, and Karrabing had nothing to do with anthropology. When audiences asked: Then what is the genre you are working in? Karrabing answered: Karrabing genre. It took a long time to get the project out of the grip of disciplinarity. And it’s true that the first films are more like ethnographic cinema. As we stopped working with non-Karrabing members, the films moved into what they are. Remember, none of us has gone to film school. None of us were intending to make films when the riot happened.
Q: What was it like to work with an external team, and why did Karrabing decide to stop working with one?
EP: It was interesting and wonderful, like a performance in which everybody gets to be the star. We made the first two films with a very small external (non-Karrabing) production team: a cameraperson, a sound person, and a guest director. Karrabing swamped them in numbers, being thirty members. By the end of the second one, we decided that the production process assumed a social reality Karrabing didn’t live in. We all thought that would be the end. But then I came back with three iPhones. We shot Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016) ourselves. This completely changed the production dynamics.
In When the Dogs Talked, as with all our films, a member comes up with an idea based on the world their parents and grandparents gave them and the one they’re struggling to live in. We often shoot spontaneously in between things happening in people’s lives. You notice there’s complete inconsistency all over the place. For example, in The Jealous One, Gavin Bianamu’s hair is constantly changing from short to long to short again.
Q: You have described the films as “improvisational realism.”7
EP: With the first film we decided that we didn’t need a script. We’d grown up together so we knew how things tend to go. And there are different levels of literacy. Plus, no one tells anyone what to do or say. Everybody is a boss for themselves. It’s not Western notions of possessive individualism. It’s also not the Western fantasy of Indigenous people as one big blob of agreement. So our films are improvised, but also we know the common ancestral understory and the colonial overstory. Plus, practically, three cameras are much better because if we shoot scenes from three different angles at once, we don’t have to repeat lines to get different angles.
Q: In When the Dogs Talked, an ancestral story connects different generations and worldviews within Karrabing. How does this polyphony enter the filmmaking process?
EP: One of the Karrabing members, Angelina Lewis, once said that before the Karrabing Film Collective, their ancestral knowledge was hanging by the thinnest thread of forgetfulness. Settler colonialism nearly destroyed all links between her ancestors and herself.
When we started to make the film, everyone said they knew the dog story. But filmmaking brings people together across generations. They listen to each other. Even the older generation said that they didn’t know about certain parts of the story until everyone came together to make the story. The assault of settler colonialism means to shatter knowledge. So we bring together all these pieces and layers of stories, stories from the dead, reactivating these ancestrally present relations, passing them down to the next kids. In that sense the films also function as an archive. And an archive of our own members, sadly. Many younger people are not with us anymore. This is also the reality of being Indigenous. The life expectancy is very low. The films have an important role because family members can see their kids who are not with us anymore. That’s also something that’s real!
Q: How does Karrabing move from the Darwin wetlands into the visibility of a settler art world? How do you negotiate the social, affective, and aesthetic economy of the films and what they generate for the community in Belyuen?
EP: If you have seen some of our other films, you’ll see what’s going on in our community under the corroding extractive settler condition. While we show films about the ancestral present geography, we don’t explicitly tell viewers what story they are seeing. There is a story underneath the story. The kids at Belyuen school can see the understory because we taught them to see it.
But I am guessing all of you wouldn’t be able to see it. Say, if you saw Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, you would know that there is a set of ancestral narratives subtending the action on the surface, but the film doesn’t tell the stories. And why should we tell it? Why should Western audiences know it?
God bless the art world for giving us money. We are very grateful. Seriously. But the art world doesn’t have a big effect on us. Not even on our artistic practice. We look at the films and we see how we have grown up, how little Kinah, who is now five or six years old, was back then. Making films is a practice oriented to keeping the memory and obligations to country strong.
Q: Could you speak about the editing process?
EP: It’s a collective process. For example, Kaydia came up with the idea for our new Barbie BBQ film (2026). Then everybody comes up with the part they’ll play, what they’ll say, and so on. The camera goes every which way, and you don’t even know who has it half the time. The same for the sound recording. One day while making Day in the Life, Kaydia really wanted to hold the recorder. She was six maybe. OK, we said, just hold it here. Miles was trying to get a set of hip-hop lines just right. Finally he got it and we all cheered, but then we noticed that Kaydia was nowhere in sight. She had left a while before to take sounds of a creek nearby!
Everything is collective, except the editing. We don’t shoot a lot of footage. And I edit when I am with everyone, so everyone can look at an edit. We have one rule: you can’t cut yourself out because you don’t like the way you look or sound. Some people are really into the editing, and some less. I’m hoping that one day someone just takes over the edit.
Q: The editing often overlaps images, as if different realities coexist within one frame. How did this aesthetic come about?
EP: A lot of the films have these thick visual overlays. The reason they’re densely montaged is because we kept on hearing people saying: Well, there’s the ancestors, and they were in the past. And there’s the police and the state, they’re over there. And there’s you guys in the present. And we keep saying, these are not separate states. They don’t exist in separate frames, visual frames or time frames. They all exist within the same frame. They’re coexisting, overlapping realities.
When we were making Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams, Daphne Yarrowin observed that non-Indigenous audiences weren’t getting what a nyuid was: a human spirit still inhabiting a place. If you know how to look, you can see them. She suggested doing a color design that made a blue, green, and yellow glowing sphere. We were working with this color designer, and I asked him to give a few ideas. Daphne pointed to the one she thought worked. So, we try to make the editing collective too.
Q: How are the films seen and shared within Karrabing? What does film culture look like in the community?
EP: We sit outside and watch our films together. We put them on USB drives and they circulate. Sometimes we project them in the community hall. Or we show them out bush to the ancestors. It’s great that the films circulate. It also allows people to move around with them. Karrabing have traveled the world in ways they otherwise wouldn’t have. They go to film festivals, universities, community schools. This is very empowering. Most of the adults in our first film When the Dogs Talked (2014) are now community leaders and leaders at the Northern Land Council. Even in the ongoingness of the settler’s grinding nastiness, they’re continuing to work to keep their relations to their lands strong.
Q: How did the films reach audiences worldwide, and what questions did this raise for the collective?
EP: I think in the beginning filmmaking was a way of holding onto something. First we went to this local university, and we all watched When the Dogs Talked there, just us, Karrabing. It was amazing and we were really happy.
Then two curators, Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl, saw what we were doing at a conference in Amsterdam.8 They wanted to organize a screening at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Eight of us went down there. We had made a deal that no matter how shy members were or how bizarre it was to talk in a place where people ask you questions and you’re supposed to answer straightaway, I couldn’t be the one to do all the talking. People would immediately think that it’s my film, and this is not the case! We don’t necessarily explain the films, but we are happy to talk about them with people.
In both places we had a question that we had never considered: Why had we decided to premiere our film work at an art gallery, and not a film festival? One of the Karrabing members, Cecilia Lewis, said: Mom (me, Beth), you have to answer this question because I don’t know what they’re asking. And I said: I don’t know what they’re asking either, to be honest. So Robyn Lane finally just said: We decided to show it here because you asked it to be shown!
The question came up at the IMA: Who are these films for? And Robyn again said: Whoever wants to see them! It’s a really interesting question because it clearly matters to some people. It just doesn’t matter to us. We make the films to continue to make this world ours, and recycle money for land-based work. All Karrabing has been trying to do is forge intergenerational bonds and counterflow the funds. We’ve made money, and now we have some trucks and a boat, thanks to our films.
Q: How does Karrabing negotiate the market for moving-image work?
EP: Yes, very quickly it became about: What do we do in terms of authorship, access, visibility, profit, and extraction? When we started to show the films in larger institutions, Vivian suggested that we needed an agent. I couldn’t believe my ears. An agent! Rex Edmunds and some others of us met with this agent in Brisbane who represents some great Indigenous artists. After the meeting, Rex asked me what an agent does. And I said: Well, I think they go to parties, they go to the people with money, and they drink martinis. It’s money people talking amongst themselves, suggesting what art is cool and important and so what they should buy. Rex asked: So this is why they’re taking 25–35 percent? I said yes, I think so! And he said: Well, in that case you can do that, and you do it for free. I said sure (I do everything for free at Karrabing), but I don’t know these rich people, I don’t have the skills necessary to talk to them. I’m not putting down these skills. I just don’t have them. But we decided I would do it.
Q: How does Karrabing approach artistic authorship, ownership, and copyright?
EP: The videos are password-protected. We make universities donate. If someone wants to show one, we hope we are getting a little fee. We are a corporation, so we jam the money into a bank account, and that money goes to land-based projects. We have been very lucky to have multiple institutions acquire editions of our films. One of the questions we had very quickly is whether white people hadn’t stolen that off?
Kelvin Bigfoot and Reggie Jorrock came up with the idea for our second film Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015). They would find two cartons of beer near an illegal mine. The police would get involved and the young men would be chased into a contaminated swamp. It’s the usual thing. There is no script, no storyboard, no preproduction. We just started to make the film based on that simple idea. We knew ahead of time that the younger guys would end up in jail for stealing beer they found, but the miners would get off scot-free. In the end, when the film was done, Kelvin and Reggie said that they wanted to put Metallica behind the scene where they’re being led off to jail. When we showed that film at the Melbourne International Film Festival, someone asked how we got permission to use the music. What permission? They stole our country, so we just stole their music. So far it hasn’t hurt anyone too much.
Q: Does film enable collective imagination and the preservation of Karrabing stories? Can we see the films as a museum, as an access point to give some insight?
EP: It’s a good question, but it’s not our question. I don’t know if I have an insight. I don’t know if I’m trying to imagine what other Karrabing members have said with regard to similar questions. Linda Yarrowin says: There is a “real” or “true” story, with a little story on top. By that I think she means that there is an ancestral story underneath, which you can’t see, which is present in one’s life but you can’t see it. This ancestral story is continually repeated in the present. We know this story, but you, as an outsider, might not have any idea what we are talking about. On top of that, there is the story about the present conditions of their lives, which is also a true story, but it’s also made up a bit.
Q: Is that how dream time is related to filmed time?
EP: Well, when we were shooting When the Dogs Talked, some scenes take place in public housing where, in real life, many families were living because they were homeless. While we were preparing the shoot, Cecilia Lewis, who had the lease, asked me: Should we make it “really real” or “kind of real”? And I said that I didn’t know and asked her what she thought. She said that if we make it “really real,” no one is going to believe the level of overcrowding people live with. She said: I think we should make it real but not “really real.” Great idea! Our guest director got really upset because we were rearranging the rooms for the scene. I argued that this is how Karrabing works.
Q: One final thought?
EP: Made-up stories don’t have any weight. At Karrabing we really differentiate between a made-up story and a story that comes from the ground. Practice makes theory. Ground makes story. Then you can put a little story on top of that. Ground is still in the present. After all, you’re standing on it.
Level Five Blue Screen (➝) is a screening program focusing on film and video works by visual artists, curated by Emma van der Put, Alasdair Asmussen Doyle, and Chloé Malcotti. Caillou Film Festival (➝) is a film festival in Brussels curated by Lietje Bauwens and Lea Vromman, exploring strategies used in territorial struggles and the role of cinema in resistance.
Lorraine Lane et al., “A Conversation with the Karrabing Film Collective,” Commoning Ethnography 2, no. 1 (2019): 188.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. See also Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
Brian R. Jacobson, The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms (New York: Columbia University Press, 2025).
Hito Steyerl, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (London: Verso, 2025).
Karrabing Film Collective, “Growing Up Karrabing: A Conversation with Gavin Bianamu, Sheree Bianamu, Natasha Lewis Bigfoot, Ethan Jorrock and Elizabeth Povinelli,” un Magazine 11, no. 2 (2017).
Tess Lea and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Karrabing: An Essay in Keywords,” Visual Anthropology Review 34, no. 1 (2018): 36–46.
Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl, “The Negative Floats: Questions of Earth Inheritance,” e-flux journal, no. 58 (October 2014), ➝.
