Introducing ‘Spear’: A Must-See Film About Indigenous Experience In Modern Australia

What does it mean to be a young Indigenous person today? As we’ve seen recently, it often involves calling people out on their ignorance. Not only has Australia had a baffling number of incidents of blackface, they’ve also inevitably been followed up by a bunch of white people telling us how we should feel about it. To start moving on from this ignorance, to build more of an understanding of the shared and individual experiences of Indigenous Australians, it’s clear we need to hear more from the people actually affected.

This is one of the reasons why Spear is such an important film. 

Directed by Stephen Page (a Munaldjali/Nunukul man who draws on his 25 years as Artistic Director of Bangarra Dance Theatre) and produced by John Harvey (former General Manager of Melbourne’s Ilbijerri Theatre, whose family originates from Sabai Island in the Torres Strait), Spear brings ancient and contemporary stories about Indigenous life in Australia to the screen. Importantly, it’s also the first local feature-length work to be produced by an Indigenous person; a fact Page describes as “one of the beautiful things about the film”.

Through this collaboration of major Indigenous arts companies, Spear uses the language of dance and music to break free of film’s traditional reliance on dialogue and narrative, while also grappling with some deeply political themes. The movie is also adapted from a 2000 Bangarra work of the same name, which in Page’s words, was “a 40-minute dance piece dealing with social issues of the 21st century”.

These are issues which haven’t gone anywhere in the 16 years since.

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“A Foot In Each World; A Heart In None”

Spear is based around the story of Djali (played by Stephen’s son, Hunter Page-Lochard): a young Aboriginal man torn between the disquiet of life in modern Sydney and dreamlike dance and ceremony in the Australian bush. Not just told in the ochre landscapes we often associate with Indigenous storytelling, the film takes us to Redfern Station, Regent Street, Central, the Wooloomooloo stairs. And with that, we’re reminded of just how many problems are present in our everyday lives.

As the different chapters progress, we see Djali face the fragmentation of modern Indigenous cultures through disadvantage, prejudice, abuse, suicide and the erosion of cultural identity. He faces this as something of a quest; Djali must navigate these different challenges, stories and lessons as he comes to discover his own power.

While not shying away from politics, the film approaches all this in a noticeably open-ended way; it invites quiet contemplation of the audience, rather than directly telling us what to think. “With Bangarra work, I like that in exploring a lot of social issues we can give hope and optimism through the theatrical settings we create in our work that connect to the spirit,” Page says.

The film’s dance foundations play a big role in making this possible. The way the dancer’s move communicates emotion in a way that transcends dialogue. Spear in fact has very little dialogue at all which, for Page, was very much a conscious choice.

“We only had 38 pages as a ‘script’,” he says. “What we tried to do was create a world where the young boy observes these different sort of chapters, or these opposed social issues, through dance and photography. In the original dance piece we had black activists’ poems, and wanted to grab those spoken word poems, manipulate them, throw them up in the air and make them the driving dialogue of the film.”

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“Art Is Great Medicine For Politics”

As well as delivering some important and timely social commentary, Spear is sure to be one of the most beautiful films to grace our cinemas this year.

Stephen’s brother and Bangarra composer David Page weaves entrancing soundscapes through the film which build moody and atmospheric worlds around the city and the bush. Bonnie Elliot’s cinematography lets us float effortlessly somewhere in the middle of the stories being told, marrying intimate portraits of the characters with expansive showcases of the landscape. Jennifer Irwin’s costume design, which fuses references to ancient stories and spirits with modern shapes, resonates with the quiet but powerful palette of colours and textures created through makeup, lighting, set design by others in Bangarra’s talented team.

Because of this, certain scenes stick in your mind. The way the camera follows one of the dancers along a river, her shimmering costume captured in the water’s reflection, or the oily black full-body paint of one of the dancers shot in an unidentifiable industrial wasteland.

“I think that art is great medicine for politics,” Page says. “This film is quite stylised. Some people might say, ‘oh, you’re just stylising the social issues. You should be a lot harsher’. I could have put in heavier scenes, but we didn’t. What I like is that, through dance and the healing of traditional song, there’s a more internal spirit about the process of dealing with these social issues, rather than just smashing up against them. We put the film’s characters in this surreal, atmospheric world, and then just let the spirit travel honestly with its message.”

The reviews from the film’s international premiere at Toronto International Film Festival are testament to this. Though US critics at Variety and The Hollywood Reporter noted they didn’t have “an understanding, or even awareness, of the long and often painful history of interaction between the indigenous population of Australia and white Europeans”, both spoke to a simpler impact the film delivered on the topic. The latter spoke of an understanding they gained through it “hazily coalescing into an emotional arc” and the former spoke about a “fractious and wide” dislocation to the land. It’s possible both may have left with a better understanding of Indigenous experience than many white Australians.

“You have to watch this film in a dark space, with strong surround sound,” Page urges local audiences. “It’s not just a visual experience; it’s not a traditional film. Just surrender your energy right from the start. Let the spirit of the film guide you through the storytelling and the journey.”

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Spear is in select Australian cinemas from today.

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Emma is a freelance writer interested in arts and culture, sustainability, and design. She spends all her savings on travel and books. She tweets from @emmajukic.