Festivals ashore: Visual sovereignty and the urgency of Indigenous film festivals

In a lecture at the University of Auckland Film and Media Studies Department on 17 September 2002, Ngāti Apa filmmaker Barry Barclay proposed Indigenous Fourth Cinema as “a late addition to the First-Second-Third Cinema framework” of American cinema, art cinema, and “Third World” cinema, respectively.¹ Indigenous Fourth Cinema, for Barclay, could not be reduced to a subset of these other industries and traditions, but required an entirely new framework to be adequately understood. Speaking about a clip of Mutiny on the Bounty (Lewis Milestone, 1962), he placed the camera-subject of First Cinema on the deck of the ship gazing at the shores of Tahiti, but imagined a scenario where the camera was inverted and placed on the Tahitian shoreline in the hands of its Indigenous people; “The Camera Ashore, the Fourth Cinema Camera, is the one held by the people for whom ‘ashore’ is their ancestral home.”² 

Despite its pretences to the contrary, the international film festival circuit would more likely find itself on the deck of the Bounty than the shores of Tahiti, reflecting and reproducing colonial power in the process. Major international film festivals have historically distinguished themselves from mainstream commercial cinema, exhibiting and enveloping national cinemas and unconventional styles while becoming dominant gatekeepers for pathways to alternative distribution. In the process of countering the hegemony of the Hollywood studio system, the festival circuit became its own normative system, reinforced by institutional programming and the intensified cycles of film festival media coverage sculpted by an aesthetic genealogy dominated by European, North American, and East Asian auteurs. Films that do not fit within these normative standards of “quality” are conventionally excluded, or if they are selected, they do not circulate widely through the rest of the circuit. This normative system tacitly excludes the majority of Indigenous films from widespread distribution. Indigenous films typically draw upon poetic traditions that are often unfamiliar to non-Native audiences, making them harder for programmers and critics to properly evaluate in a vacuum. They are often produced with limited budgets and institutional resources, resulting in production qualities that often fail to make it into theatres.

This is not to say that Indigenous filmmakers have been entirely ignored by the international film community. To the contrary, they have gained greater visibility on the global festival circuit over the past two decades: Inuk director Zacharias Kunuk won the Caméra d’Or for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), Kaytetye director Warwick Thornton won the Caméra d’Or and Venice Special Jury Prize for Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017), respectively, while David Gulpilil won Best Actor in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes for Charlie’s Country (Rolf de Heer, 2014). At the same time, Native-led initiatives such as the Sundance Institute Indigenous Program and 4th World Media have worked within the film festival circuit to platform and empower First Nations filmmakers to professionalise their creative practice and build connections across the international film scene.

Yet, as Barclay argues, the integrity of Fourth Cinema is not a question of mere visibility, but of sovereignty. From the dawn of cinema, Indigenous bodies have been cinematically captured as a means of objectification, de-subjectification, and political subjugation. As Michelle H. Raheja writes, Native American actors worked within the Hollywood studio system (both on-screen and off-screen) to contest these cultural formations and reposition their people within the uncertain national imaginary of the United States.³ Within this system built upon institutional racism and Indigenous disempowerment, First Nations actors and directors laboured to create self-images that reasserted sovereignty within the restrictive parameters of the studio system, striving to depict themselves on their own terms.⁴ Contrary to this, however, Barclay’s Fourth Cinema is not a subaltern subset of mainstream cinema whose rules and structures fundamentally reinforce the (settler-colonial) status quo, but something radically distinct that originates and is governed on its own terms. He writes:

Indigenous cultures are outside the national orthodoxy. They are outside the national outlook. They are outside spiritually, for sure. And almost everywhere on the planet, Indigenous Peoples, some 300 million of them in total, according to the statisticians – are outside materially also. They are outside the national outlook by definition, for Indigenous cultures are ancient remnant cultures persisting within the modern nation state.⁵

As an outworking and expression of Indigenous sovereignty, Fourth Cinema demands both aesthetic and institutional self-governance, highlighting the importance of Indigenous film festivals as sites of enacted visual sovereignty.

The past three decades have seen exponential growth in global Indigenous filmmaking. At the time of his lecture in 2002, Barclay identified just six completed international feature films and a further five from Aotearoa New Zealand that could be classified as properly “Fourth Cinema,” but the changing cultural, financial, and technological conditions of the new millennium soon led to a dramatic transformation of global Indigenous cinema. Digital production tools and workflows dramatically lowered the cost of filmmaking outside of industrial studio systems, a benefit acutely felt by filmmakers in regional and remote communities with limited access to institutional filmmaking resources. Digital filmmaking dissolved many of the logistical barriers previously imposed by celluloid production workflows – film shipping, development, linear editing, and distribution – and enabled a new generation of Indigenous filmmakers to produce flexible, low-cost short films and distribute them easily across large distances in ways that were previously cost prohibitive. Alongside these technological developments, the establishment of Indigenous-focussed funding bodies such as Pacific Islanders in Communications (US, 1991), Screen Australia’s First Nations Department (Australia, 1993), Te Māngai Pāho (Māori Broadcast Funding Agency, Aotearoa New Zealand, 1994), the International Sami Film Institute (Norway, 2009) and the Indigenous Screen Office (Canada, 2017) have underwritten a large and increasingly professionalised First Nations cinema. In the twenty-five years since Barclay’s lecture, this has grown exponentially: in 2025, the 26th imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival screened 20 feature-length and 79 short First Nations films; that same year, the biennial Birrarangga Film Festival screened 38 features and 90 shorts, including an extensive retrospective program; in 2026, the 13th Māoriland Film Festival screened 19 feature films and 89 short films in 70 Indigenous languages.

This programmatic breadth and diversity reflect the growing importance of these festivals as sites of Indigenous cosmopolitanism. Whereas the international film festival circuit reproduces a cosmopolitanism oriented towards transnational cinephilia, Indigenous film festivals cultivate a different cosmopolitanism grounded upon the intersecting experiences of different communities while maintaining their distinct identities. Māoriland simultaneously embodies a deep commitment to te ao Māori (the Māori world) through its sustained incorporation of te reo Māori (Māori language) throughout the festival and embedding tikanga (traditional customs) in every level of its operations. Crucially, however, Māoriland is not an international film festival with Māori elements, but a Māori festival in which international engagement is filtered through an inextricably te ao Māori lens. The festival begins with a Pōwiri, a formal welcome to the Raukawa Marae that is conducted almost entirely in te reo Māori. Although appearing on its surface as an act of cultural exclusion (after all, few international guests would be fluent in te reo Māori), this opening gesture destabilises English as the lingua franca and opens space for other ngā reo taketake (Indigenous languages) to be used and celebrated within the festival by other communities in attendance. 

This grounding in Indigenous language and cultural practice facilitates different forms of cinematic spectatorship better suited to Indigenous screen poetics. Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cinema, for example, is often shaped by kaona – a system of layering multiple simultaneous meanings grounded in the moʻokūʻauhau (genealogy) of other stories, places, and ancestral lineages.⁶ These references are intimately grounded in ʻāina (land, “that which feeds”) and often interweave references to other moʻolelo (Kānaka Maoli storytelling and oral histories) in ways that only make sense through a dynamic and relational interaction between speaker and listener. To an untrained observer, the poetic structure of Hawaiian cinema may seem discontinuous or populated by odd detours, but for audiences familiar with moʻolelo and the filmmaker’s moʻokūʻauhau, these films are reconsidered as reservoirs of richly contextualised meaning. 

This Indigenisation of the film festival format goes beyond language and programming and informs the very temporality of the festival itself. Periodically, when an event or conversation runs over time at Māoriland, rather than cut the conversation short, the rest of the festival bends around it. Short delays are normal, as they allow speakers the time to finish their thoughts and communicate what they have to say. Although every film festival schedule adjusts to meet the contingencies of the day, Māoriland seems to invert those priorities, as contingency itself becomes the point. The relational accidents and momentary intimacies that occur on the sidelines of a festival fold into the centre. On one level, we could read this flexibility as an expression of “Māori Time” – a flexible, relationship-driven temporality that prioritises the task at hand over abstract adherence to Western “Clock Time” scheduling – yet we could find corollaries with many other temporal practices, from Pasifika “Island Time” to Indonesian jam karet (“rubber time”). What is truly exceptional, however, is that monochronic clock time – a temporal system of social organisation tied so specifically to the needs of industrial modernity despite its tension with all existing experiences of polychronic time – became the norm. Despite its givenness and cultural dominance, Western monochronic clock time is actually the odd one out amidst an ocean of cultural multiplicities.

In the post-COVID era, Indigenous film festivals are under threat, and it is vital for the international film community to advocate not only for the preservation of these institutions but also the protection of Indigenous self-governance and aesthetic sovereignty within the film festival system. In Aotearoa, the Luxon government continues to undermine funding for Māori cultural institutions and the arts, making it increasingly difficult for Māori-led institutions – including Māoriland Film Festival – to maintain their programs, let alone expand them. In Australia, the failed 2023 Australian Indigenous voice referendum exposed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to increasing public hostility and scrutiny by uncovering racist biases in the Australian community. In the United States, the Federal Government’s crackdowns on arts funding, public broadcasting, and diversity initiatives have further destabilised already vulnerable arts institutions still recovering from COVID-era disruptions. As the other essays in this dossier demonstrate, these challenging conditions are by no means unique to the Indigenous film festival circuit, but as institutions necessarily “outside the national orthodoxy,” they remain especially vulnerable to exogenous shocks. As a global film community, we cannot be satisfied with maximising Indigenous visibility within systems we maintain dominance over. The camera must be returned to the shore.

Endnotes