Sustaining Yolngu culture

The Mulka Project responds to Yolngu requests for ceremonial recording throughout NE Arnhem land. We provide digital documentation, media facilities and AV products to promote, maintain and revive cultural activities. In these contexts we are able to deliver media training through workshops on country. This approach allows us to present, interpret and preserve Yolngu culture, but also to move forward and help nurture and shape a new digital generation of Yolngu artists.

Video production right at home in Arnhem Land

The Mulka Project is a unique and innovative entity that is forging new strategies for engaging indigenous youth facing social and geographic isolation in the promotion, protection, maintenance and networking of Yolngu knowledge through the digital realm. Currently we're working with the boys living at Gutjangan, who are making a film directed by James Marika. His previous film "Wandjuk and the Pilot " you can see below.

Above Dhaypu is getting help walking backwards. Below Wukun is filming the waterfall.		The Mulka Project presents a film by James Marika.

Video Archive & Production

Our facilties allow us to digitise, edit and archive old videos about the community and to create new HD films with Sony Z1 cameras and Final Cut Studio software. The time has come for Yolngu to take over the reigns of digital technology and tell their own stories, whether it's fiction, documentary or commentary on current events that affect them. We're just getting started, but you can see clips of some of our first material at our YouTube channel. Here's a quick clip of our short film of children singing and dancing traditional ceremony at the river Gularri near Dhalinybuy.

Nuwaniny and Dindirrk shooting the video you can see at right.

Film Workshops with Community Prophets

The Yothu Yindi Foundation sponsored two visits by Community Prophets trainers David Vadiveloo and Rachel Nanginaaq Edwardson in 2007, to work with Mulka staff and secondary students from the Yirrkala Community Education Centre.  Mulka facilities were the home for workshops that have seen over 20 students interviewing each other and people on the street and working on short films, fiction, music video clips and documentation of community activities.  Standout students continued to work with David & Rachel throughout Garma, in the role of directors for a professional camera crew, and have been hired to work after school and between terms.

David Vadiveloo instructing students on different types of shots.		Students practicing shooting an interview with Mulka co-director Wukun Wanambi.

Our first completed docudrama ‘Lost Boy Found’ was accepted into the Human Rights Art & Film Festival, showing the potential for Yolngu filmmaking right out of the gate.  The film was conceived by and starred Andrew Mungatopi and was directed and shot by Mulka co-director Wukun Wanambi and secondary student Bunbuyngu Marika.  It featured several community members in their first acting roles.  The film is a huge hit in the Mulka Project’s public computers.

Stills from ‘Lost Boy Found’. Click on play at right to view the entire short film.

This program was a great success and the community looks forward to David & Rachel’s return visits. School staff commented that of all the video workshops that have been done, this was the first time professional cameras have ever been handed over to the students to use.  David & Rachel in turn have raved about the Mulka Project's facilities and the community's talented youth.  The long term goal of this relationship is to train a new generation of creative and employable Yolngu filmmakers, to end the era of outside crews coming in to tell Yolngu stories, and turn the reigns over to the Yolngu themselves.