Summaries

Synopsis

In this one-hour documentary Australian Aborigine actress and playwright Ningali Lawford is introduced to Native American performance artist James Luna via video conferencing. Throughout a four-day period, the artists use their interactive video link to share dialogue, performances, and video diaries about their work, their careers, their families, and the parallel histories of their cultures under colonial domination. Intercut with this are clips from their performances, which primarily explore racism and its consequences. For example, Luna performs by being an interactive exhibit in a museum, while Lawford performs in a play exploring the attitudes of Asian immigrants to Australia to the Aborigine peoples. Lawford and Luna did not know each other before the production began, but the filmmakers obviously knew what whey were setting up for the audience.

The documentary proceeds from introductions and general information about performances and careers to more personal presentations of the original homes and families of its two subjects. It comes to a climax as Luna and Lawford reveal to each other and to us their people's parallel experiences with forced removal of children from families, for placement in government-run schools designed to prevent them from learning their ancestral languages and cultures.

The nominal subjects of this documentary are two people. The real subjects are the technology and the communities that it brings together. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has the promise to allow people from opposite ends of the Earth, who previously could not work together, or even find out that the other exists, to discover that they face the same problems, and to collaborate on solving them.