The family of the great Yolngu leader Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda is searching for answers. Seventy years after his controversial murder trial and subsequent disappearance, Dhakiyarr’s body has still not been found. His descendants know that justice was not served. They want to restore what was denied to him: his honour. This is their story, told in their own words—of two laws, two cultures and two families coming to terms with the past.
The Kaimas are settlers in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, without land of their own, living on small plots on the outskirts of Goroka town by arrangement with the traditional landowners. The soil is too poor to grow their food and they have to rely on cash earnings to survive.
Lukas sometimes finds part-time work as a night watchman and laborer, but decides to try his hand at the betelnut trade to see if he can earn some extra money to make ends meet. The film follows Lukas and his wife as they try to make a success of their business, traveling to and from the coast on the betelnut trail.
When Geraldine Kawangka’s husband died she and her six children moved out of their suburban-style house at Aurukun on Cape York Peninsula. In earlier times their bark house would have been abandoned and burnt to avoid contact with the dead man’s spirit and to allow it to return to its own traditional country. Now, with Western-style housing, this is no longer possible. Instead a ‘house-opening’ ceremony has evolved at Aurukun as a way of dealing with death in the midst of new living patterns. The ceremony is a colourful and creative mingling of traditional Aboriginal, Torres Strait Island and European elements. Although the atmosphere sometimes suggests a party, its underlying purpose is serious. This film follows the opening of Geraldine Kawangka’s house and records her feelings about the ceremony, revealed in her informative and sometimes personal commentary.
The first film in the Turkana Conversations trilogy is a multifaceted portrait of Lorang, the head of the homestead and one of the important senior men of the Turkana. Because they are relatively isolated and self-sufficient, most Turkana (including Lorang’s son) see their way of life continuing unchanged into the future. But Lorang thinks otherwise, for he has seen something of the outside world. “Lorang’s Way” is a study of a man who has come to see his society as vulnerable and whose traditional role in it has been shaped by that realization. The film explores Lorang’s personality and ideas through his conversations with the filmmakers, the testimony of his friends and relatives, and observation of his behavior with his wives, his children, and men of his own age and status.
In a remote part of Australia a small homeland community is fighting for its life. The community Elders can see their culture decline and decay as their young keep moving to nearby mining towns for better life. They worry that their ancestral lands ,culture and their people may become weak and lost under the impact of the globalization in 21st Century. This is the story of a community struggling to assimilate a richly complex traditional culture with the inevitable change of modernization . The film shows, in a stunningly intimate way, how a traditional culture hopes to raise their kids with the dignity, insight, and self-respect necessary to survive in the twist of tradiontional and modern life.