Contact

New Zealand Premiere

Contact is constructed around one of the most extraordinary pieces of footage in Australian history: the moment when a group of Martu women and children walk in from their nomadic
existence of millennia into modernity.

This group of twenty Aboriginals in the remote Great Sandy Desert, had no contact or knowledge of modern Australia.

The film centres on Yuwali, the beautiful 17 year-old girl we see making that giant leap on the 24th of September 1964. Now 62, Yuwali’s account of the ‘first contact’ experience is the fullest and most revealing ever caught on film.

A huge space rocket test – Blue Streak – was to be fired in May 1964 at their home in the dry Percival Lakes. The authorities sent in patrol officers to evacuate anyone living there to protect them from rocket debris.

The days counting down to blast off drive the narrative of the film. Back at the Lakes, Yuwali gives a riveting account as she and her group were chased hundreds of kilometres trying to escape the ‘devilmen’ in the ‘rocks that move’ (four wheel drives).

The climax is both extraordinary and emotional.