Cauleen Smith’s The Volcano Manifesto is but one of several contemporary works in this program that use artistically imaginative forms, even humorous ones, to investigate themes of exile, liberation, the erasure of Indigenous societies and cultures, and the legacy of colonialism.
Night Fishing with Ancestors. 2023. Australia. Directed by Karrabing Film Collective. 24 min. US premiere.
The artists of Karrabing, a grassroots media group operating out of Belyuen, an Indigenous community in Australia’s Northern Territory, bring a kind of knowing and defiant irreverence to their retelling and refashioning of historical narratives. In Night Fishing with Ancestors, they relate a tale of first encounters, when in the early-mid 18th century Makassar traders set sail from Indonesia to the shores of northern Australia in search of trepang (sea cucumbers), a coveted delicacy, and there made contact with Aboriginal peoples, a momentous and relatively peaceful encounter that left both cultures forever changed. What if history ended there, the film asks, before Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770 brought the cruelties of European colonialism in his wake?
Give it Back: Stage Theory. 2023. USA. Directed by New Red Order. 6 min. New York premiere.
First presented in the St. Louis art triennial Counterpublic, a civically minded exercise in historical and cultural consciousness raising, the Indigenous public secret society New Red Order’s Give It Back: Stage Theory draws on the panoramic paintings of 19th-century exhibition dioramas and on efforts to restore what remains of Sugarloaf Mound, the last intact Native American mound in the region, much of which was razed to clear space for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis World’s Fair) and its wildly popular Igorot Village, where “savage natives” from the Philippines were put on view.
The Volcano Manifesto. 2025. USA. Directed by Cauleen Smith. 50 min. World premiere.
Presented as a trilogy for the first time, Cauleen Smith’s The Volcano Manifesto brings together three recent films—My Caldera (2022), Mines to Caves (2023), and The Deep West Assembly (2024)—in an astonishingly ambitious, densely woven meditation on geological and cinematic time, on the wild abyss of volcanoes and the womb of mines and caves (pregnant with meaning!), and on the prelapsarian and the postdiluvian (Deluzian?).
Program 80 min.