Contact

Contact features unique archive footage of an exceptional meeting that took place in 1964, in a desolate area of Australia. Yuwali is one of the Martu, a community of women and children who spent their whole lives living in the desert, until the area had to be evacuated for missile testing. In Contact, 62-year-old Yuwali vividly recalls how frightening it was to see white men for the very first time. She fled the area with a group of 20 Aborigines, afraid of the white "devil men" whom they believed would surely eat them. Yuwali's eyewitness testimony is interspersed with the stories of the Australians who explored the area. It was a strange meeting for them as well, encountering a group with "absolutely no world sense at all." Once the Aborigines had been found, their desert existence was at an end. They were given clothing for the first time in their lives and driven out to a Christian Mission. The Martu community now seems accustomed to its new way of life: watching archive footage of their people clad in nothing but a belt leaves them in stitches. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)