Make no mistake, GURRUMUL is a great Australian film about a great Australian.
Culturally and musically invigorating, it is both engagingly enlightening and thrillingly entertaining.
An enormous amount of research – relevant and reverent – has gone into the development of this film. The audience requires a lot of information to make sense of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s musical rise because it emerged from a culture that’s so different to that of most people watching the film.
The film’s writer/ director, Paul Williams, assumed, quite rightly, “our audience knows next to nothing about Australian Indigenous culture generally, less about the Yolngu culture of North East Arnhem Land, and nothing about Gurrumul’s Gumatj Clan Nation. I’ve assumed our audience has never heard of Gurrumul’s home town Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island. Most of our audience will know Gurrumul as “that blind Aboriginal singer” if they know him at all.”
“Gurrumul is the personification of a cross-over artist, likewise, the film must cross back and forth between his Yolngu and the broader whitefella worlds. Ultimately the film is about two very different worlds coming together to produce something amazing. The tension in the film comes from balanda (whitefella) and Yolngu worlds being unable to totally fulfil each other’s expectation due to their pre-existing cultural commitments.”
GURRUMUL is as much the story of three amigos as is it is about the one man: Gurrumul, of course, shy, short shrifted by sight but gloriously gifted in voice and musical acumen. There’s Michael Hohnen who has been with Gurrumul for decades, his musical colleague and spokesperson. And there’s Mark Grose from Skinnyfish Music, fixer, promoter, cultural conduit..
American tours and duets with Sting are a big deal with white fella promoters, record companies, television programmers, but they are nothing to the cultural and spiritual prerogatives and priorities of Gurrumul – duty and spirit over dollars and cents.
GURRUMUL opens in darkness, a black screen, and throughout the film endeavours to express visually what the experience of blindness might be like. Scenes change with segues into and out of darkness engendering a sense of the world being aurally heightened. We are in Gurrumul’s world of sound shifting through space and time. Fade up from black and we are in another place and the story moves on.
It is interesting to note that in Yolngu lore the name, image and voice of the recently departed is retired from all public use. Such is the significance of this singer, the magnitude of his magnificence, a very rare exception has been made by Gumatj and Gälpu clan leaders for this film. The family have given permission that following the final funeral ceremony, his name and image may once again be used publicly to ensure that his legacy will continue to inspire both his people and Australians more broadly.
Three days before his death he approved this film. It remains unchanged since this time.