After making its world premiere at MIFF 2015 and emerging as a fan favourite, Putuparri and the Rainmakers was awarded with the Festival’s Premiere Fund and went on to win big at the Western Australian Cinefest Oz festival. Director and producer Nicole Ma explores ten years in the life of Tom Lawford, or ‘Putuparri’ to use his native tongue, as he aims to keep the traditions of his ancestors alive in modern Australia.
He lives in Fitzroy Crossing, a small town in the Kimberly region of WA which is “either a shithole or the best place in the country” depending on your viewpoint. His people have lived on the outskirts of the Great Sandy Desert for the better part of 40,000 years and have used their unique gifts to cultivate this ancient land and used traditions passed down for innumerable generations to bring rain to one of the driest places in Australia. In the middle of the Great Sandy Desert is a waterhole known as Kurtal where it is said the spirits of Putuparri’s people return when they die. This is where a majority of the film takes place as Tom helps his grand-father Nyilpirr Ngalyaku or ‘Spider’ travel back to this extremely remote and sacred outcrop to perform rituals that have been passed down for millennia.
Lovingly crafted with a combination of archive footage and fresh interviews, including some very striking cinematography by Paul Elliot who captures the sere wasteland of the Great Sandy Desert in all its desolate glory, Nicola Ma has made a film that deals with the many complexities of indigenous culture in today’s Australia. Included in this is the steady grinding down of traditions, land right disputes and native title claims that are still causing significant problems to aboriginals today. Although some of the darker subplots are slightly glossed over such as Lawford’s battle with domestic violence and the demon drink, there is a lot to appreciate here and Ma has the decency to present this film’s case without preaching or becoming overly reverential.
The complexity of writing about cinema like this is while it does have with very important things to say about the challenges of indigenous culture in current Australia, it’s very hard to deny that as a documentary it does seem quite padded and at times drawn out. Time after time we travel with Spider and Lawford into to the Great Sandy Desert to visit the waterhole of Kurtal, which ends up being repetitive. There’s the sense that everything that the documentary wants to educate the audience about could have been summed up in a one hour tele-movie, not a needlessly padded 100 minute feature documentary.
All modern day Australians should take the time to educate themselves about the native people of this land and the often horrific race relations that factor time-and-again in our history. Despite some of the problems that Putuparri and the Rainmakers can’t quite overcome, this is an important and rare glimpse into the wisdom and tradition of the oldest continuing culture in human history which tragically seems on the precipice of disappearing forever.
Putuparri and the Rainmakers opens in limited release from 1st October through Sensible Films.
