Alessandro Cavadini

White people don't understand that there are two laws - white people have different laws from Aboriginal people. TWO LAWS is a film about history, law and life in the community of Borroloola in far North Queensland. The films offers viewers a remarkable and different way of seeing and hearing. Like the film, BACKROADS, it is one of the few productions at that time in which Aboriginal people had creative input. The impetus for TWO LAWS came from the community themselves. There was substantial collaboration with the film makers before and during the shooting period. It is one of the most outstanding films to be made during the 1980s. It is an historical analysis of what, nearly forty years later, is an increasingly contemporary question. Two Laws.

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Describes life on the Aboriginal reserve of Palm Island in Queensland. Old men from Dyirbal language group tell stories of the massacres and poisoning of their people when they first came in contact with the white settlers.

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Exposé of the ill-treatment of Aboriginal workers by white men. A dramatised documentary about the June 1957 Aboriginal strike on Palm Island reserve, off the north Queensland coast.

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Ningla A-Na documents the activism of the Black movement in south-east Australia in the 1970s and shows how the activists changed the direction of the movement both nationally and internationally.

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As notions of civil rights transformed across the world, so was the screen landscape reformed by the ascension of grassroots film movements seeking to challenge the mainstream. Some aspired to push form to its limit; others worked to destabilise what they saw as a homogenous industry, or to provoke questions around gender, sexuality, migration and race.

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White people don't understand that there are two laws - white people have different laws from Aboriginal people. TWO LAWS is a film about history, law and life in the community of Borroloola in far North Queensland. The films offers viewers a remarkable and different way of seeing and hearing. Like the film, BACKROADS, it is one of the few productions at that time in which Aboriginal people had creative input. The impetus for TWO LAWS came from the community themselves. There was substantial collaboration with the film makers before and during the shooting period. It is one of the most outstanding films to be made during the 1980s. It is an historical analysis of what, nearly forty years later, is an increasingly contemporary question. Two Laws.

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Ningla A-Na documents the activism of the Black movement in south-east Australia in the 1970s and shows how the activists changed the direction of the movement both nationally and internationally.

Open details →