Charlie Freedman
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Mr. Poetry

FEATURE DOCUMENTARY
POST-PRODUCTION
 Once revered as Australia’s “greatest living writer,” Aboriginal poet laureate Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty didn’t learn to read or write until his early 20s. For fivty years he weaponised the language of his coloniser for his own poetical means.

A prolific writer, painter and speaker, he shares hundreds of poems in a collaborative film with his friends, turning 200 hours of footage into an intricate, fragile world of personal and political resistance. Moving between Cherbourg Aboriginal mission, his “yellow submarine” shack on Mununjali country, protest lines and hospital wards, Mr. Poetry transcends linear time to reveal a complex, formidable man who has been writing, filming and agitating in obsessive fury his whole life.

An untold and immensely powerful archive of Aboriginal literature and activism, Dhoompoo Lionel’s film questions the legacy he will leave behind and asks us how are we complicit in the violence of a colony, and the creativity and resistance that survives in spite of it.

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 Directors: Charlie Freedman, Mia Tinkler & Alex Vella-Horne
Co-Director: Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty
Producers: Mia Tinkler & Charlie Freedman
Cinematography: Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty, Charlie Freedman, Mia Tinkler & Clancy
Sound Recording: Alex Vella-Horne
Editor: James Ruse
Executive Producer: Molly Reynolds
Story Development: Declan Furber Gillick