Bedevil

It's rare seeing a film that is made by an indigenous person for indigenous people starring indigenous people. Tracey Moffatt 's Bedevil uses beautiful, almost eerie cinematography to tell three separate stories of hauntings. But these stories also speak to white colonialism and how Aboriginal people have been pushed to the outer margins in their own country. The film is quirky and very different but still accessible to everyone who doesn't mind watching a movie from a different perspective. Sadly it was not a box office hit at the time, but people have grown to love it and appreciate it for what it is. On another note, it's fun to see old places that I remember, like the local CES office and old buildings that are no longer there.

BeDevil (1993) addresses the marginalization of Aboriginal Australians in the events, symbolism, and media hype surrounding the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia in 1988. Tracey Moffatt challenges the racial stereotypes by gearing a political process of reform and self-recognition though her postmodernist 'identity search'-driven work aiming at appropriation of hegemonic spectacle. BeDevil disrupts the hegemony of the pure original canon that excluded Aboriginal Australians from the mainstream. This sort of exclusion practice is a known phenomenon worldwide, more so happens in the post-colonial Third World countries like Pakistan and India as both exclude their ethnic minorities from the mainstream media. The author echoes back to Moffatt's stories of bedeviling experiences with tales of similar issues around race, gender, and normality from Islamic Republic of Pakistan, wherein post-Independence immigrants are constantly struggling for appropriation and redefinition of their identities. The Pakistan born children of miscegenation are considered immigrants by descent despite the facts concerning Islamic origins, two nations' theory, migration, and over 60 years residency. The author shares the mutually bedeviling experiences of 'othering' and a struggle with the notions of shared social conscience and histories between children of miscegenation in Australia and Pakistan in the context of the Australian trilogy.

In the best style of the supernatural stories of the television sixties Tracey Moffatt give us avant gard cinematography making a stylized Australian outback mixed between real things and sets with a very beautiful and dramatical photography full of irony, humour ,suspense and tragedy; she made a very unusual films and as always with this kind of films is very hard to accept the new reality that the director propose, then after the mixed feelings regular moviegoers but just of the regular cinema that always told the same story and in the same style never creating a new world, probably could be disappointed, if you think cinema is an adventure and the approximation to new cosmovisions and of course poetry and beauty, then this is a film for you.

Highly stylised, hyper-imaginary, hyper-real. There's no denying what beDevil represents, challenging the racial stereotypes of Australian society, creating and sharing stories to make sense of the world, while encouraging and reflecting on connections between the past and the present, people and places. It's an anthology of modern folklore horror sold purely on its constant tonal shifts, visual experimentation and being the first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman, giving prominent roles to Aboriginal people. It's a surreal experience and one that highlights a personal mythology of Tracey Moffat, often feeling like an impressionist painting come to life, far from my cup of tea but one of immense intrigue.