A middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her old white mother. During her tending of the old woman, she expresses her frustrations and previously suppressed anger, her own need for warmth and love, and her personal loneliness. Her memories and dreams invade her nerve-fraying routine until the old woman dies and she begins to experience an immense sense of loss.
In the ABC Radio National program, It's Not A Race in May 2017, Marcia Langton notes that Night Cries is the retelling of Jedda as a horror story.
Rosalie, Marcia and Jedda
Beverley Wang
(interviewer),
Canberra
:
ABC Radio National
,
2017
16902557
2017
single work
interview
podcast
'Back in 1955 Rosalie Kunoth-Monks and Robert Tudawali starred in Jedda.
'It was the first film in Australian history to feature actual Indigenous actors in the leading roles.
'Kunoth-Monks played the central character of Jedda, and the film broke new ground in terms of representation.
'But the film's depiction of Indigenous Australians — drawing on romanticised stereotypes — is also problematic.
'Professor Marcia Langton played the character of Jedda in Night Cries, a 1989 response to the original film.
'Langton and Kunoth-Monks talk to It's Not A Race to discuss the legacy of the film, and their experiences playing the iconic character of Jedda.'
(Introduction)
'In a tiny cinema in the Latin Quarter of Paris, something very unusual for French filmgoers is on display. For five days, the programme at Cinema La Clef is devoted not to the latest Hollywood blockbusters, nor to the finest French cinema, but to the best examples of Australian Indigenous film-making.'
'The first Festival of Australian Aboriginal Cinema (La Festival du Cinéma Aborigène Australien) will showcase films that may have garnered awards at Cannes, but are nonetheless unfamiliar to audiences in one of the world’s capitals of cinematic culture. It is the first festival of its kind in Europe.'
