Karrabing: an essay in keywords

Using forms of “improvisational realism,” the north Australian-based Karrrabing Indigenous Film Collective mimics and plays with strategies of fabulation and faux realism to provoke audiences into new ways of understanding the multileveled worlds Indigenous families inhabit and think about. Successful as their filmography has been, Karrabing works nonetheless enter a culturally saturated visual contract that threatens to tip their productions back into a recognizable, morally responsible, set of resemblances. This visual or social contract is not of the Karrabing’s making but interpolates a response, which we explore here by way of keywords: ethnography/documentary, cultural maintenance, training, collaboration, and transparency.