'Empathy is Always a Much-Needed Quality': An Interview with Filmmaker/Educator Rachel Perkins

Article sample: 

Born in Canberra in 1970, Australian filmmaker Rachel Perkins grew up in the beating heart of Australia's Indigenous civil rights movement, an experience amplified by the role of her prominent Indigenous activist parents. Five years prior to her arrival, inspired by the Freedom Riders of the American Civil Rights Movement, Perkins' father, Charles, embarked on Australia's own Freedom Ride. Leading the newly formed Student Action for Aborigines group, Charles Perkins presided over the collection of University of Sydney students who toured through rural New South Wales. The busload of students protested, picketed, and faced violence in each town they visited but continued to raise the issue of Indigenous rights. In 1967, Australia overwhelmingly passed a referendum removing discriminatory sections in the Australian constitution, and the decade that followed was an era of social change: the abolishment of the White Australia Policy (1972), the passing of the Racial Discrimination Act (1975), and the first of what would be many Aboriginal Land Rights Acts being established in the Northern Territory (1976).

About Senses of Cinema:

Senses of Cinema is an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema. We believe cinema is an art that can take many forms, from the industrially-produced blockbuster to the hand-crafted experimental work; we also aim to encourage awareness of the histories of such diverse forms. As an Australian-based journal, we have a special commitment to the regular, wide-ranging analysis and critique of Australian cinema, past and present. Senses of Cinema is primarily concerned with ideas about particular films or bodies of work, but also with the regimes (ideological, economic and so forth) under which films are produced and viewed, and with the more abstract theoretical and philosophical issues raised by film study.