Keeping the Faith
In 2001, Naina Sen moved from Delhi to Melbourne to study filmmaking. She was instantly drawn to one of the oldest living cultures in the world—Australia’s aboriginal people. “As a storyteller and filmmaker, how could you not want to know more?” she asks. “I feel a deep acknowledgement and understanding of its indigenous culture and real relationships with the First Nations was a defining factor of the Australia I choose to live in.” Australia has been Sen’s home now for 17 years.
“I still find it strange that so little is known about aboriginal culture in Australia itself,” she says. “There are so many stories that still need to be told.” The drive to tell them has taken the Darwinbased projection and installation artist and filmmaker “to remote parts of Australia where 99 per cent of the local population hasn’t” gone. In 2014, she’d hear the story of an aboriginal women’s choir, based in churches of Central Australia, which sang sacred hymns German Lutheran missionaries had passed down 140 years ago in their own languages, Western Arrarnta and Pitjantjatjara. The subsequent documentary, The Song Keepers, which Sen made from 2014-17, ran in Australian cinemas for 12 weeks last year. The film recently completed three screenings in India as part of Australia Fest.
In the profound voices of the elder members of the choir she found a reliable source to bring the choir to the forefront and make their music accessible. “There is a generation of elders who are getting older and they feel the need to find a safe and secure way to pass on their knowledge to the next generation,” says Sen. “They [choir members] very quickly realised this [the film] way not just a way to tell but also preserve the story.”
The Song Keepers is more than just a documentary about 40 people heading to Germany on their first overseas performance tour, though. It’s also a film that offers a less-heard perspective on the impact of missionaries who came to the land that would come to be known as Australia, says Sen. It’s told through the “sensitive personal back stories” of some senior members