Tracey Moffatt, Nice Coloured Girls

Get an introduction to Australian artist/filmmaker Tracey Moffatt at this wikipedia page.

Sense of Cinema has an analysis of Moffatt's film Nice Coloured Girls. A segment:

"The film confronts orthodox histories of colonial race and gender relations. The use of colonial documents (through the voice-over of Lieutenant Bradley's diaries) recalls the arrival of the First Fleet and the beginning of dispossession for black Australians. The relationship between black women and white men in the film is romantic and paternal (characteristic of early relations but not of contemporary ones) and this serves to illustrate both the naivety and self-deception of the writers of the colonial documents and the astuteness of the women. The colonists are shown to be naive because they believe the women need protection but the women, in fact, have a clear understanding of how interracial relations work and how to manipulate the situation to their advantage to get what they want. The depicted relationship between Aboriginal women and white men links the contemporary Aboriginal women with their female ancestors. Another link to the women's ancestors is the subtitle which informs the audience that they call the white men "Captains" because that is what their grandmothers called them. A continuity of cultural identity is confirmed."

Read the rest here.

- Sujewa