Aboriginal elders hijack the camera to tell white Australia: you don't own this story.
White people don't understand that there are two laws - white people have different laws from Aboriginal people. TWO LAWS is a film about history, law and life in the community of Borroloola in far North Queensland. The films offers viewers a remarkable and different way of seeing and hearing. Like the film, BACKROADS, it is one of the few productions at that time in which Aboriginal people had creative input. The impetus for TWO LAWS came from the community themselves. There was substantial collaboration with the film makers before and during the shooting period. It is one of the most outstanding films to be made during the 1980s. It is an historical analysis of what, nearly forty years later, is an increasingly contemporary question. Two Laws.
Direction
Community-controlled storytelling that white directors still fail at.
Editing
Deliberate pacing forces you to adjust to Borroloola time.
Production
Rare 1982 Aboriginal creative authorship — still revolutionary.
Director
Carolyn Strachan
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Part of Australia's 'Aboriginal Renaissance' in cinema, this emerged when Indigenous creatives finally wrested control from ethnographic filmmakers who'd treated them as subjects.
The title refers to actual legal pluralism — Yanyuwa law and colonial law operating simultaneously, not the cliché 'two worlds' narrative white audiences expect.
AU
