Karrabing Film Collective’s single-channel work Night Time Go is an exploration of the settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War.

In 1943, Karrabing ancestors were interned in a camp near Delissaville for fear they would become spies for the Japanese. The story of their escape from the camp exists nowhere in official records. Night Time Go begins hewing closely to the historical details of this disenfranchisement before slowly morphing into an alternative history in which drama, humour and satire turn the tables on the powerful. Combining ‘improvised realism’ and doctored archival footage overlaid with a quasi- British Pathé voiceover, the work fearlessly imagines an alternative history of the Belyuen community.

Karrabing Film Collective consists of over 50 members. All but one are Indigenous, and range in age from newborn to elder; their lives are connected by the coastal waters west of Darwin. With no formal training in art or film, they turned to film making in 2008 to spotlight the inequalities of contemporary settler colonialism, challenging its supremacy in the process. Shot on Country and in community, their work revels the power of storytelling and the joy of making, representing truly innovative and collaborative filmmaking.

A conversation between Linda Yarrowin (Karrabing Film Collective) and Anna Zagala (Samstag Museum of Art).