
Our Generation
Aboriginal Australia meets colonial Australia head-on in this account of a relationship that has never been settled by treaty. More than 400 Indigenous communities lived on the continent for some 60,000 years before British colonization began in the late 1700s, and filmmakers Sinem Saban and Damien Curtis build their case largely from the Yolngu community in Northeast Arnhem Land, one of the few places where traditional culture and language have survived intact. Interviews with Yolngu elders, national Indigenous leaders, historians, and human rights activists lay out how government policy has pushed Aboriginal people onto small, disadvantaged parcels of land, echoing the reservation system used against Native Americans in the United States, and how mining interests now push for even smaller, urbanized allotments. The film returns repeatedly to a single, glaring fact: Australia has never signed a formal agreement with its Indigenous population, making it the only country of its kind still operating without one. It won Best Campaign Film at the 2011 London International Documentary Festival.