Message Sticks 2012

Overview

For 13 years, Message Sticks has been bringing the best of Indigenous film to the Sydney Opera House. Now, buoyed by its successes — including premiering Warwick Thornton's much-lauded Samson and Delilah and winning Best Australian Film Festival at the IF Awards in 2009 — it's expanding to include an exciting array of music, talks, dance, storytelling and art.

The fusion of contemporary arts practices gives festivalgoers a unique brush with Indigenous culture and traditions. Each day at dusk you can gather for Dancestry, which brings the ritual and communion of traditional corroboree into the present day with dance, song and ceremony. An Icons concert will unite the legendary Shane Howard, Neil Murray and Archie Roach on one stage, while Tri Nations brings together amazing female performers from three first nations, and Casey Donovan leads her band in a tribute to Mama Cass (from the Mamas and the Papas). On the talks front, you can see Gary Foley and Larissa Behrendt discuss the tent embassy, Margaret and David being Margaret and David as they talk about Indigenous cinema, and plenty more.

But oh, the films. They're still there, grouped into two free blocks of weekend viewing, and with an emphasis on crosscultural stories of Indigenous plights. On Sunday, you can catch two features: Toomelah, Ivan Sen's story of mission life that made the grade at Cannes, and, out of Canada, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, which shares the lessons of another Indigenous struggle, capturing a 78-day armed standoff between the Mohawks, the Quebec police and the Canadian army.

On Saturday it's more an onslaught of shorts, including the likes of Nalingu (Yours and Mine), based on writer/director Billy McPherson's real experience picking up a hitchhiker with an eerie connection to his family, and The Russians Are Coming, the quirky story of how, for 10 days in 1820, a group of wayward Russian sailors and local Maoris became mates.

The latest project from the Black Arm Band, dirtsong — a collaboration through music, language and image — will close the festival on Sunday, April 1.

Image from Toomelah by Ivan Sen.