The National Film & Sound Archive’s WINHANGANHA, the debut feature film from acclaimed Wiradjuri poet and artist Jazz Money, will screen for Australian audiences from November in selected national venues.
WINHANGANHA, a Wiradjuri word that can be translated in English to ‘remember, know, think’, was inspired by Money’s desire to interrogate the complex and intersecting ways in which archives represent and affect the lives of First Nations peoples.
The film emerged from the NFSA’s Re/Vision project, which invited a female Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander creative to build a new work from the national digital audiovisual collection, based on a response to the question: Who Are We Now?
Ranging from early audio recordings through to contemporary TV, and including feature films, sports
programs, and music clips, Money has built a narrative from the voices in the audiovisual content held and preserved by the NFSA. The work also features a new and original score by Filipino-Aboriginal Drapper and composer Rhyan Clapham a.k.a. DOBBY.
‘In creating WINHANGANHA, it was important to me that it celebrated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander protest and resistance, both to material dispossession and also in the creation of film, television and music that centres our experiences,’ said Money.
‘And while protest is the turning point within the film, it is love and joy that is the overall message.’
‘WINHANGANHA is both a universal and intensely personal journey, weaving a lyrical narrative path through decades of Australian audiovisual history,’ said Patrick McIntyre, CEO of the NFSA. ‘Jazz Money has presented an extraordinary creative statement which sits between the worlds of art and
film, and which is a compelling and thought-provoking testament to the power of archives to tell new
stories.’
Jazz Money. Image: Hannah Leser.
The NFSA, in association with the Sydney Film Festival, will present the 64-minute feature, described by
Money as ‘a poem in five acts’ at the Art Gallery of NSW on 10 November.
In Canberra, the film will debut on 15 November at the NFSA’s Arc Cinema, while Melbourne audiences can see the film at a free screening at ACMI on 6 December. A free Brisbane screening will take place on 26 January at the Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA, with further screenings around Australia to take place in 2024.
Jazz Money’s other digital work appears online and in galleries and museums around Australia and around the world. In 2020, she was awarded the David Unaipon Award from the State Library of Queensland and a First Nations Emerging Career Award from the Australian Council for the Arts. Her debut book, how to make a basket, was released in 2021. Her poetry has been published widely across Australia, and reimagined as murals, visual and video art.
