Another Country

Synopsis

In north-east Arnhem land, around 500 kilometres east of Darwin, lies a small Aboriginal community isolated from the rest of Australia called Ramingining. There’s just two schools, one convenience store and one police station to cater for the one thousand that live there.

Narrated and guided by Gulpilil himself, Another Country looks at how the way of life in Ramingining was derailed by white settlement.

It is an attempt to make sense of the contradictions of the modern Aboriginal experience – a sobering, searing, though often humorous account of a people forced to change too fast and too far, and then left to fade by those who had wrought that change.

Exploring the physical, social and spiritual landscapes of David Gulpilil’s own community, Another Country offers an all-too-rare first-hand account of the fundamental clash between the Aboriginal way of life and the lifestyle demanded of them by government policy.

This documentary film speaks to the havoc caused by superimposing a new culture over an old culture and the consequent clashes about all manner of things, such as time, money, garbage and errant kangaroos.

To Gulpilil it is our refusal to acknowledge this incompatibility that breeds such disconnection and destruction – a racial catastrophe that is unfolding because we cannot talk about race.

“From the outside looking in, broader Australia can’t fathom why a township like Ramingining functions as it does. The Yolngu, especially the elders who have experienced the world beyond Ramingining, they understand all too well. When it came to crafting the story of what happened when their culture was interrupted by ours, there was no one better than Gulpilil to tell us how it is,” says director Molly Reynolds.

Gulpilil’s commentary is dramatic, enlightening, earnest and at times playful and mischievous… a rich, deeply thoughtful and humane documentary.—Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian

Trailer