As dusk falls on the small community of Beswick, children gather in a circle to dance, impromptu, to the didgeridoo. In the air is the sweet, thick taste of anticipation. Tonight, the inaugural Northern Territory Travelling Film festival (NTTFF) – consisting of a giant al fresco inflatable screen, blown up by hand in each of the 10 Indigenous communities it lands in, covering about 8,400 kilometres – is coming to town.
But there is another reason for the feeling of tension. Billed in the program is Finding Maawirrangga, the 2017 documentary in which actor and musician Balang T Lewis – the star of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith – returns to his grandmother’s country to learn his songlines.
It is the first time the short film has been shown since Lewis died suddenly last month, aged just 59, from a heart attack. In a prescient scene, Lewis stares at the camera. “I am not going to the grave without my songs,” he declares.
“The film was just emotional – it took my breath away,” says Lewis’ cousin, 52-year-old Lillian Ngalmi Joshua, thumping her heart with her fist. The film was, for Ngalmi Joshua, “a celebration of him, after we buried him and [said] goodbye to him.”
Murrungun man Lewis was a giant in the remote Arnhem Land community, where he returned in 2001. It is in Beswick that he and his wife Fleur Parry founded the Djilpin Arts Aboriginal Corporation, as well as the Walking with Spirits festival. As Julia Morris, producer of Finding Maawirrangga, puts it: “He’s the dreamer and she’s the doer.”
Reminders of his funeral, held just days before the film screening, are everywhere: inside the Beswick art gallery, a photo album of Lewis is propped up with a bunch of plastic roses; just to the left of the outdoor cinema screen is the bower shade, a shelter topped with a mass of leaves, where family and friends came to pay their respects.
Lewis shot to fame in 1978, plucked from obscurity to play the title character of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith: a half-caste Aboriginal man haunted by systematic discrimination and abuse. He more recently starred in a critically acclaimed Aboriginal King Lear titled The Shadow King, was a regular on the Melbourne theatre scene, and toured Australia and the globe with his jazz duo Lewis & Young.
Yet too often his work, and that of other Indigenous actors and filmmakers, was not seen in the communities from which it came. The film festival was founded so that audiences could access “stories that reflect back their lives,” says Britt Guy, creative producer of NTTFF’s touring company Accomplice. “The NT is exported to other places ... but quite often the communities themselves don’t get to celebrate their films, their stories.”
This is exacerbated by a severe lack of cinemas: in the Northern Territory film screens are located only in Alice Springs, Katherine, and Darwin. To combat this, and to tackle remoteness head on, the film festival has brought the buttercup yellow Mobile Solar Cinema to viewers.
From 21 May to 9 June, a free program of 10 shorts made by local filmmakers was taken to 10 Aboriginal communities. (There were also ticketed outdoor screenings across iconic locations including Kakadu and Nitmiluk National Park.) Guy shrugs and points to her vehicle, covered with a thin veil of dust: “It’s two people in a trailer for four weeks travelling thousands of miles. That car and that trailer is all there is to the NT Travelling Film festival.”
Reactions have varied from town to town, as the festival has crossed language lines. “Different communities can understand the in-jokes, so you get completely different laughs in different places,” says Guy. “With the passing of Mr Lewis, that film in particular – as we’ve come closer to where he is from – has also [led to] a period of reflection for some of those communities that hold family members.”
The festival is ambitious in scope. But Torres Strait Islander dancer and comedian Ghenoa Gela insists the mission matters. “Stories can actually help people,” she says, in the nearby country town of Katherine. “If you see something similar to your own story there on the big screen, you find a sense of validity in yourself. It can shift your perception.”
Ngalmi Joshua agrees: “It is very important when we find ourselves, coloured people, on a project on a big film.”
Lewis, famous both on and off the screen, was “a real character of the Territory,” insists Guy.
Yet as someone who straddled both the white and black worlds (his mother was Aboriginal, his father Welsh), he also made significant sacrifices to pursue the arts.
“He had a lot of weight on his shoulders that he had to carry,” notes Morris. “Jimmie Blacksmith changed his life for good and for bad. It opened up the world and travelling and people, but also it took him away from his family.”
In Finding Maawirrangga, Lewis delves deeper into such issues, discussing banishment from his community due to cultural missteps on the stage. “I’ve been punished too long and I never gave up,” he says in the documentary, directed with grace by Dylan River Glynn McDonald. His journey to the Sandy Island of Maawirrangga, achieved through learning the Thumbul corroboree, was a homecoming of sorts.
Lewis’ death leaves a gap: the “voice that can speak to many different parts and people of Australia,” maintains Morris. For now, though, bringing Finding Maawirrangga to Beswick, even for one night, was for many as much a moment of great pride as well as sadness.
“An Aboriginal in the film industry, you know, making a name for himself ...” artist Ivan Ngalmi, partner to Lewis’ cousin Ngalmi Joshua, says, tailing off and shaking his head. “He didn’t call himself a white man or yellow. He was an Aboriginal.”
Nine-year-old Lydia, Ngalmi Joshua’s whippet-smart granddaughter, may have lost someone she loved. But she has also been inspired. “I was so happy,” she says, sitting under the stars after watching Finding Maawirrangga, in which she featured. She sticks out her tongue, with shyness. “I want to be an actor. I want to be famous too.”
• The Guardian was a guest of the Northern Territory Travelling Film festival
