Karrabing press materials

Karrabing!
Low Tide Turning

Written and performed by the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation
Directed by Liza Johnson and Elizabeth A. Povinelli
2012
13:30 minutes
Format, HDcam

Contact Information:
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Public Officer, Karrabing Indigenous Corporation
250 West 27th Street
Apt 4C
New York, New York 10001 USA
ep2122@columbia.edu
Mobile +1-917-622-5926
Website: http://www.karrabing.com

Synopsis:
In the Northern Territory of Australia, an extended Indigenous family attempts to track down a missing family member so as not to lose their government housing. As they move back and forth between the suburban ghetto where they live and a remote landscape where they are trying to establish an outstation, they run up against the everyday obstacles of structural and racialized poverty.

Writing and Production Process:
Karrabing! Low Tide Turning is a grassroots film, conceived and written by the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation, that seeks to capture the complex contours and settings of Australian Indigenous life beyond prevalent stereotypes of “authentic” mythological primitives or assimilated, urban, drug-addled welfare recipients. The Karrabing Indigenous Corporation was established in 2008. Its purpose is to find a way of life that joins Indigenous and non-Indigenous aspirations for a culturally diverse, technological engaged, economically and environmentally sustainable and rich future. The Karrabing believe their lived experience matches that of many contemporary indigenous Australians where traditional and modern ways of seeing and experiencing the world is simply part of their everyday life. Over twenty-six years ago, the parents and grandparents of current corporation members recruited Povinelli to work with them on a highly contested land claim. She has continued to work with their families ever since. Karrabing and Povinelli recruited Liza Johnson because of her films like South of Ten and In the Air, in which she works with nonprofessional performers to reflect on contemporary social, environmental and economic disasters through the temporality of the everyday rather than the spectacular. Adapting Augusto Boal’s techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed, the Karrabing, Povinelli and Johnson conceived, improvised and critiqued various narrative scenarios, affective registers, and character studies in order to capture the awkward hope for contemporary spaces of Indigenous life where dreams are many, humor abundant, but social and personal success is often measured by nothing more than the resilience of making it through the day.

Directors Bios:
Liza Johnson is an artist and filmmaker. She received her BA from Williams College in 1992 and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1996. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker Art Center, and the Centre Pompidou, as well as the Cannes, New York, Berlin, and Rotterdam Film Festivals, among many others. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm and the Sundance Institute, and is currently releasing the fiction feature RETURN, starring Linda Cardellini and Michael Shannon. She is currently Professor of Art at Williams College.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an academic and cultural critic. She received a BA in philosophy and mathematics at St Johns College, Santa Fe, 1984 and PhD in Anthropology at Yale University, 1991. She is the author of four books, most recently, The Empire of Love and The Economies of Abandonment, and has been an invited visitor at Cambridge University, the American Academy in Berlin, The Franklin Humanities Center at Duke University. She was editor of Public Culture from 2000 to 2004 and is a founding member of Karrabing Indigenous Corporation. She is currently Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University.

Principal Cast:
Angie LEWIS, Cecilia LEWIS, Rex EDMUNDS
Also featuring, Linda YARROWIN, Rex SING, Shannon SING, Robyn LANE, Trevor BIANAMU, Ricky BIANAMU, Sherri BIANAMU, Gavin BIANAMU, Taleesh BIANAMU, Marcia BIGFOOT, Kelvin BIGFOOT, Ryan BIGFOOT, Sharon LANE, Serina LANE, Daphne YARROWIN, Ethan YARROWIN, Sandra YARROWIN, Roger YARROWIN, Claude YARROWIN, Paul LANE

Crew:
Directors: Liza Johnson and Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Scriptwriter: Karrabing Indigenous Corporation
Producer: Tess Lea
Director of Photography: Tim Wood
Sound Recordist: Ian Redfearn

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