The Ripple Effect

René Vautier, le rebelle

Jane Elliott brings her brown-eye/blue-eye diversity training to Australia, where she explores racism between Aboriginal and white Australians.

Australian-born filmmaker George Miller offers a personal view of Australian films. He suggests that they can be regarded as visual music, public dreaming, mythology, and song-lines. In extrapolating the idea of movies as song-lines he examines feature films under the following categories: songs of the land; the bushman; the convicts; the bush-rangers; mates and larrikins; the digger; pommy bashing; the sheilas; gays; the wogs; blackfellas; and urban subversion. He then concludes that these films can be thought of as "Hymns that sing of Australia."

Follow the coach and players from a local footy club in Finley as they battle adversity and triumph from the COVID-19 pandemic that grips the town and the world. A documentary exploring the soul of country football.

Residents of a Melbourne social housing community strive to reclaim their own hope and identity in the face of recent deaths and a larger societal question – can we meaningfully coexist?

Ella Havelka made history in 2013 by becoming the first Indigenous dancer at the 50-year-old Australian Ballet. In this engaging, MIFF Premiere Fund-supported world premiere, Ella – a descendant of the Wiradjuri people – charts her inspiring journey from growing up in modest circumstances as the only child of a single mother in rural Australia to gaining entry to National Ballet School, then spending formative years with the acclaimed Bangarra Dance Theatre before accepting the invitation of The Australian Ballet's artistic director David McAllister to join one of the world's foremost ballet companies.

During the time of the Stolen Generations, thousands upon thousands of Aboriginal girls were taken from their families and pressed into domestic servitude by the Australian Government. They were supposedly employed as servants, but with total control over their movements, wages and living conditions, their lives all too frequently became an inescapable cycle of abuse, rape and enslavement, with consequences that echo powerfully to this day. Recounting the stories of five of these women – Rita, Violet and the three Wenberg sisters – Servant or Slave is a commanding piece of first-person testimony to a dark and unacknowledged corner of Australian history. Shot with admirable craft and humanity by documentarian Steven McGregor (Croker Island Exodus, MIFF 2012), Servant or Slave is a work of great sadness and urgency, bringing to forceful life the human tragedy of Australia's Indigenous history in the unadorned words of those who lived it.

This documentary is about the Afghan cameleer who came to Australia more than a century ago, and travelled across some of the harshest parts of the country. The film explores the historic relationship between the desert and Afghani immigrants in Aboriginal Australia by looking at the role they played in the development of the country and how they helped to set up the railway lines, overland Telegraph line and provided supplies to remote mission stations and farms. By the mid–1800s, exploration in Australia was at its peak with expeditions setting out almost monthly. The race to map the continent, locate natural resources or find new places to settle moved away from the coast and further into the inhospitable heart of Australia. It was soon obvious that the traditional horses and wagons used for such expeditions were not suitable in this strange and foreign land.

Down Under, just a few nights after the November full moon - when water temperature and tides are just right - one of nature's most extraordinary events explodes into life. Thousands of coral join in an elaborate mating ritual, a synchronized dance of naturally occurring phenomena that help increase the coral's odds of survival. Journey through more than 1,200 miles of Australia's treasured Great Barrier Reef to discover the secrets of the unique marine life that inhabit this dazzling spectacle, considered to be the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms and declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Colin Jones is of Aboriginal, Polynesian and English decent. The Aboriginal side of his family are from the Kalkadoon and Nunuckle tribal groups. His grandfather taught him about Aboriginal traditions and the art of his people. Colin is now a noted Artist. At present Colin is studying for his Masters Degree in Humanities. Much of the history that he talks about in this video comes from his own studies and research, conducted over many years. Colin's reason for making this video is to explain from an Aboriginal point of view based on his historical data, what has happened to his people over the past two hundred years since the white man arrive in Australia.

Originally broadcast on ABC's True Stories in 1993, Feed Them to the Cannibals tells the story of Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. It was the first time cameras were allowed at Sleaze Ball and the Mardi Gras Party.

Exploring how punk influenced politics in late-1970s Britain, when a group of artists united to take on the National Front, armed only with a fanzine and a love of music.

WINHANGANHA (Wiradjuri language: Remember, know, think) - is a lyrical journey of archival footage and sound, poetry and original composition. It is an examination of how archives and the legacies of collection affect First Nations people and wider Australia, told through the lens of acclaimed Wiradjuri artist, Jazz Money.

This film examines how, since white settlement, Australians have structured, and restructured, their time. Despite some basic inequalities, Australia was a new nation trying to throw off the conditions of the Old World. Even two world wars and severe economic depression could not deter Australians from pursuit of “the fair go”. By the 1950s most middle class Australians lived in an ordered, protected, prosperous world of school, employment, Saturday afternoon sport and the Sunday roast. Yet today Australia is following the global trend towards a population divided between the overworked and the underemployed. The old 9 to 5 certainties are no longer in place. People work from home via computer; shop in non-stop trading supermarkets seven days a week; and online 24 hours a day. Overtime has increased and penalty rates are disappearing.

Something in the Water explores the rock phenomenon that is music in WA. How can the most isolated city in the world have exploded with so many successful bands over the years? Across decades and genres, Something in the Water asks "what is responsible for the sparkling talent pool?"

A short film / documentary that depicts the daily grind of first-generation immigrants in Australia.

Shows the Kakadu lands in Northern Australia and the people who live there, the Gagudju Aborigines, their story and their culture.

Follows Mas and Saha, two young Iranian asylum seeker musicians, navigating a frightening new world of immigration detention - where they discover the power of music.

System (2025) is a short documentary film exploring intergenerational connections to land and country. Interviews with Aunty Denise Morgan Bulled, a Yorta Yorta Elder; John Toll and his family, fourth-generation farmers in Gunbower wetlands; and two Local 10 year olds, Harry and his friend Mac. The film reflects on how the river system shapes their daily lives, impacts their quality of life, and influences their passion for country.