Lai Lai Dreamtime

In the past decade in Australia, the pace-of-change in political thinking by filmmakers and theorists about Australian Aborignal people has been very great, yet many of the same, tired, old prejudices are still with us, as well as some very new ones, which have been spawned from the debate about the politics of representation (who has the 'right' to say 'what' about 'whom'). There is still a lurking dissonance, born out of resentment, guilt and fear, which cries out to be resolved, but in the process of this resolution we must oppose simplicity and slogans (a very colonial style) and seek meaning in chaos and complexity. Films about Aboriginal people made by others mostly fail at both ends of the spectrum but I think that this film is a brilliant exception. LAI LAI DREAMTIME is certainly in the tradition of Robert Flaherty but fortunately, it is not an 'ethnographic film'. Through re-enactment and by purely cinematic means, it seeks to reveal something of the cosmological world of one Aboriginal tribe in the North West of Australia. It is not self-conscious and it is not apologetic; through its formal beauty it haunts me and I am rewarded with a sense of another's time and place.