Indigenous storytelling: Deconstructing the archetype

Indigenous archetypes have different rules to our non-Indigenous counterparts and so in any interpretation of our films it is important to see what sort of lens is being created by Indigenous cinema. As a programmer for imagineNATIVE and Winda Film Festival, I am immersed in Indigenous films made by Indigenous directors and writers. In the last three years I have watched around 400 to 500 Indigenous films made by Indigenous filmmakers, each year observing the vast spectrum across genres and have witnessed a real growth of a strong industry of shorts, features and documentaries. The more I watch these films, the more I see a subtle difference and sometimes not so subtle difference in the portrayal of the central characters as universal archetypes.