Rachel Perkins: Creating Change Through Blackfella Films

Article sample:

The vehicle for Rachel Perkins' project of creating change – by re-articulating Australian history and culture from Indigenous perspectives – has been her production company, Blackfella Films. Critical acclaim and industry awards for Blackfella Films reached a high-water mark with the archival series First Australians (Rachel Perkins and Beck Cole, 2008), the documentary The Tall Man (Tony Krawitz, 2011), the telemovie biopic Mabo (Rachel Perkins, 2012), and the television drama series Redfern Now (prod. Darren Dale and Miranda Dear, 2012, 2013). These productions from Blackfella Films are part of a critical mass of Indigenous filmmaking set in motion in the 1970s, the decade when a renaissance in Australian cinema, theatre, and the arts was underpinned by cultural nationalism. In the slipstream of this renaissance, Indigenous film training and production built slowly in the 1980s-90s, gathered strength during the 2000s and reached a critical mass, known as the Blak Wave, around 2009.

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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.