River Of Dreams
- Country
- Australia
- Year
- 1998
- Director
- John Hughes
- Producer
- John Hughes
- Finance
- Film Finance Corporation Australia, SBS Independent
- Budget
- AUD 220,000
- Length
- 52 minutes
Synopsis
RIVER OF DREAMS explores the radically divergent approaches to 'country' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, conservationists and developers in the 'remote' Kimberley region of Australia's north west. Aboriginal performance artist Ningali Lawford, who was born in Fitzroy Crossing, narrates this imaginative and rich account of differing visions for the future of “landscape” and “county” at a moment when governments and the cotton industry propose a dam on the glorious Fitzroy river.
Impact
The Director's Statement
The film received awards from environmental and teaching organizations, screened on television and has ongoing distribution in educational contexts. All this work has a 'poetic' essay dimension available to the documentary form. The film deals with actuality very directly, but it also speaks through the deployment of the 'sensuous image' that is peculiar to this particular art form.
Like any individual work it is impossible to quantify an affect, in the way one might quantify the value of an advertising campaign or a free gift offer with a purchase of cosmetics. Just as it is impossible to quantify the 'social good' of a painting, a novel, a theatrical performance, the work of an individual teacher or the toiling dedication of a generation of quietly concerned and active citizens. I make no claim as to the specific social impact of my body of work; but I am prepared to defend its legitimacy in its attempt to provide other perspectives, and to illuminate our social experience. It is vital, given the range of pressures that increasingly undermine support for development, production and distribution of documentary that we to search for new solutions. We need to re-invigorate the capacity of the non-government sector to support this important tool in the construction of a viable independent voice in Australian democratic discourse.