Strength in Numbers: A review of ‘We Are Still Here’

But in this dreamlike animation, writer-director Danielle MacLean gradually pans up from deep in the ocean blue to reveal a mother and daughter fishing in a canoe. Together, they face the ominous image of an invading ship. The juxtaposition of this mystical and timeless relationship between sky and sea, with the horrors signaled by the forthcoming ship, sets a clear tone for a film commissioned to reckon with the British Empire’s uninvited arrival in the Indigenous territories of the Pacific in the late eighteenth century: one that centers the voices of the people who were already living on these lands and who, despite centuries of genocidal violence, still remain.

We Are Still Here is a series of eight short films, referred to as chapters, quilted together into one epic feature written and directed by 12 Indigenous filmmakers from what is now Australia, New Zealand, and Samoa. After a pitch call by Screen Australia’s Indigenous Department and the New Zealand Film Commission directly to Indigenous storytellers, ​​the filmmakers convened for a series of development workshops in which they ultimately decided it would be more impactful to make one collaborative, anthology-based feature than several standalone shorts.

Historical chapters play from start to finish without cutting into other stories, while others set in the present or future weave in and out across the entire film. For example, MacLean’s Lured, with its ethereal quality, acts as an effective interstitial to help transition the film from one chapter to the next. In Tracey Rigney’s Rebel Art, a young Aboriginal activist arms herself with spray paint and tags the streets of Melbourne after a tragic accident occurs in her family. Appearing between historical chapters, Rigney’s story grounds We Are Still Here in the present day. There are also historical tales such as The Uniform, from writer-directors Miki Magasiva and Mario Gaoa, about a Samoan soldier surviving in a manhole during World War I through his unlikely friendship with a Turkish ally. And in The Bull and The RuRu, written and directed by Renae Maihi, Māori activists lead anti-Apartheid protests in 1981 in New Zealand. Thus, the film’s structure echoes what its title declares: We Are Still Here is as much about what the past has wrought upon native Pacific Islanders as it is about their present-day resilience and dreams for the future of their people.

The second and final chapters of We Are Still Here both feature Aboriginal men who are victims of white men’s violence, connecting the not-too-subtle dots between eras. Woke, from writer-director Dena Curtis, is set in the 1862 outback. A British settler threatens an Aboriginal tracker and his family, but he still helps the colonizer navigate the land. The short makes a compelling visual statement about the power of Indigenous spiritual beliefs—that the living and ancestors walk the same ground. Grog Shop, directed by Beck Cole and written by Samuel Nuggin-Paynter, is a present-day romantic comedy that also sheds light on recurring police harassment and intimidation of an Aboriginal man buying “grog” (liquor) in a small town shop. The historical resonance between the protagonists in Woke and Grog Shop rings clear: despite the centuries between them, Aboriginal men are still facing white violence in different forms. By the time one takes in the story of Grog Shop, the title of We Are Still Here feels more expansive. It has become a striking refrain of Indigenous pride that resonates beyond trauma to resilience and ancestral power.

Despite declaring itself a feature, We Are Still Here stops short of being fully cohesive, and it’s probably more accurate to call it a group of shorts, each with distinct visual languages and points of view, artfully edited together into something meant to be watched as a whole. (The power of the film’s edit is best seen in the film’s final sequence, in which a series of pivotal stills from each of the eight chapters are called back in quick beats as a final incantation.) We Are Still Here is a fragmented epic, but an epic nonetheless. And perhaps this is precisely the greatest offering it makes to viewers.

The decision to create and present the film as a collective effort, not just the work of several individual auteurs, is a norm-bucking choice in the context of the larger commercial film industry. And it takes the programming decisions about each short out of the hands of programmers while giving a dozen filmmakers an international platform they may not have had otherwise. Case in point: the film made its North American premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.

It reminds me of something visual artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka, who comes from the Ho-Chunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, told BlackStar executive director Maori Karmael Holmes on the Many Lumens podcast in 2022.¹ While there are some who “just want to be the lonely Indian in a room of white people,” Hopinka said, “the more people you can bring with you, the better. . . . The more of us there are in these different spaces, the harder it is to essentialize these experiences, because there’s a multitude of experiences.” I can’t think of a more powerful case for We Are Still Here to exist as it does, and why more filmmakers and funders should follow the lead of its creators.