An amazing and provocative short film about Australia Day and our First Nations people is making its voice heard this Australia Day.
Highly commended in the recent Canberra Short Film Festival (CSFF), “What is Australia Day?” by Raymond Salomonn, features the magical vocal soundtrack of Shama Rain – and stars precociously talented 8-year-old Adrita Akash – all of Bangladeshi origin.
Packing a punch at just over four minutes long, the documentary goes right to the heart of the debate about Australian nationhood, annual observance and memories of indigenous persecution that keep us divided as a nation. And the film is all the more powerful for the immigrant roots of its makers. It has also been selected as a Wild Cards finalist for the International Changing Face Film Festival (www.changingfaceiff.org)
Sydney-based migration specialist Raymond Salomonn, also a filmmaker, songwriter – and himself a former refugee – says questions about Australia Day “strike at the conscience of humanity”.
“Really, it’s easy to ask the most painful question for Australia… but much harder to answer them; in just 4 minutes and 22 seconds we expose the wound of Australia’s bleeding heart. When the nation celebrates its birth in the shadow of centuries of murder and mistreatment, emptiness descends on our conscience. Our dreams of nation-building cannot be achieved by celebrating the imperial theft of Australia from its indigenous people.”
Raymond Salomonn began his career as an aviator in the Bangladesh Air Force, emigrating to Australia in 2003. A UTS law graduate who now practices as a Registered Migration Agent, Raymond studied filmmaking in Australian Film Radio and Television School (AFTRS). He is also an award-winning songwriter and filmmaker, with his first work, the musical film “Baba” on the 1975 assassination of Bangladesh’s founding father Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman winning 10 awards and nominations at film festivals around the world. Raymond has dedicated this film “to the thousands of indigenous people of this land who were subjected to unspeakable mistreatment for centuries”.
Shama Rain (Nafisa Shama Probha) moved to Australia in 2020 from Bangladesh as an international student. She is a singer and vocal artist (singing in multiple languages) and takes private lessons in singing while studying concurrently musicianship at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and law at UTS.
Adrita Akash, a migrant child of 8 learnt about indigenous persecution at school. Growing up in a new country, her own quest for identity remains unresolved as she struggles with the moral dilemma of January 26. In the film she asks the poignant question: “The picture you are painting with Australia Day… shall I paint the same picture too?”.
Cinematographer and editor Shimul Shikder studied film at North Sydney TAFE and in the seven years since has more than 200 films to his credit ‘in the can’. His most recent film on the song by Rabindranath Tagore – India’s only Nobel laureate for literature – garnered 19 international awards and nominations.
View the film: https://youtu.be/iFg_bKbYgRg View Shama’s anthem performance: https://youtu.be/dBrSJ97NuRg