“Everyone talks about making our children ready for school, but we have to make school ready for our children.”
Margaret Kemarre Turner, Arrente Elder
In My Blood It Runs, was made in collaboration with Arrernte & Garrwa families and communities in the Northern Territory.
Through the eyes of children living in the Northern Territory, this observational documentary examines the ways families, often under extreme circumstances, are striving to pass on cultural knowledge. It offers a chance to view education, learning and success, in a new light.
It follows the story of 10-year-old Dujuan Hoosan, a child-healer and good hunter who speaks three languages. He shares his wisdom of history and the complex world around him, yet Dujuan is ‘failing’ in school and facing increasing scrutiny from welfare and the police. We walk with him as he grapples with these pressures, shares his truths and somewhere in-between finds space to dream, imagine and hope for his future self.
Offering a narrative that allows people to see learning in a new way, this film invites global audiences onto unfamiliar ground, where they can experience the value of an Aboriginal worldview and begin to understand the nuances of knowledge systems that have been passed down in an unbroken line for 60,000 years.
This is a film about belonging and becoming. An underlying problem that impacts on kids everywhere is a disconnection from identity that sustains and nourishes growth. This film asks, how can we value the strengths of the Indigenous knowledge systems and support kids to succeed as cultural leaders, as well as to be educated and literate in the western world?
“My people don't desire to be second class citizens and drift with the currents of prescribed solutions. My people don't desire educational failure because education is not designed for them.”
William Tilmouth
