Contact (2009)

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Movie
Original title Contact
Country of production Australia
original language English
Publishing year 2009
length 80 minutes
Rod
Director Bentley Dean ,
Martin Butler
production Martin Butler
music Antony Partos
camera Bentley Dean
cut Tania take
occupation
  • Grant Judson
  • Thelma Judson
  • Yuwali Nixon

Contact is a 2009 Australian documentary film related to an event from 1964. At that time a group of came Aborigines of Martu in contact with civilization for the first time.

The film is based on the book Cleared Out: First Contact in the Western Desert by Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson and Yuwali.

action

The Aborigines, who lived in difficult conditions in the outback and had no contact with whites, moved in the Percival Lakes area in Western Australia . Two white Australians were sent to the area in the Great Sandy Desert , which is characterized by salt lakes , to search it for people. It was intended to have medium-range missiles of the Blue Streak type hit the desert after a launch at the Woomera test site .

The film shows footage from 1964 that Walter MacDougall shot with a 16mm camera and recent interviews with Yuwali. She was a 17-year-old girl at the time and 62 when she was making the film. Yuwali lived with her mother in a group of 20 girls of different ages. The group moved in the desert without men. Yuwali saw white people for the first time in her life and thought the truck was a walking rock with white devils. She was scared and hid. During the night she followed her mother's footsteps in the desert. Contacting the Aborigines was difficult because the Aborigines always fled. Fortunately, the first rocket launch in Woomera was postponed due to bad weather. The whites also followed the group's footsteps and came into contact with them. The fear eased when the men gave them food. Since they didn't like the food, they buried it in the sand. The naked women and girls were dressed and taken to an Aboriginal mission station in Jigalong run by the Apostolic Church .

Yuwali

At the mission station they received food and money. Yuwali, the leading actress, couldn't do anything with money and thought it was worthless, so she buried it in a river bed.

She later became a cattle station helper, married twice, and had four children. At the age of 62 she lived with two of her children in Parnngurr in the Pilbara . When she was asked about her life in the outback in the film, she said: “We left our hearts back in our country” (Eng .: “We left our hearts in our country”).

Yuwali was born in the Yulpu Rockhole in the middle of the Percival Lakes area and lived her early life nomadically with her family.

Premiere

The documentary was shown for the first time on June 4, 2009 at the Sydney Film Festival , where it was recognized as best documentary.

Awards

Australia

  • Prime Minister's History Prize
  • Best Feature Length Documentary, Australian Film Institute Awards
  • Best Coverage of Indigenous Affairs, Walkley Award
  • Best Feature Documentary, Film Critics Circle of Australia
  • New South Wales Premier's History Prize for Multimedia
  • Foxtel Documentary Prize, Sydney Film Festival
  • Best Achievement in Directing for Documentary, Australian Directors Guild
  • Best Achievement in Sound for a Documentary, Australian Screen Sound Guild
  • Bronze award for Cinematography Documentaries-Cinema and TV, Australian Cinematographers Society

International

  • Gold Hugo for Best Television Production & Best Documentary - Social / Political, USA
  • Best Documentary, Miradas Film Festival, Canary Islands , Spain
  • Best Documentary-Pacific / Oceania, Annu-ru Aboro Film Festival, New Caledonia , France
  • Ecumenical Dialogue Award, Planete Doc Review Film Festival, Poland

Others

A book by Sue Davenport titled Cleared Out: First Contact in the Western Desert describes the event.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.creativespirits.info/resources/movies/contact For the film Contact at Creative Spirits, accessed on Feb. 29, 2020
  2. ↑ creativespirits.info : Contact , in English, accessed on May 30, 2013
  3. ↑ thevine.com.au  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : Tim Elliot: First contact a terrifying trek into the Space Age , in English, accessed May 31, 2013@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.thevine.com.au  
  4. ↑ smh.com.au : Garry Maddox; Contact , September 10, 2010, in English, accessed May 30, 2013
  5. ↑ a b abc.net.au ( Memento of the original from December 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : Contact , in English, accessed May 31, 2013  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / shop.abc.net.au