Locating The Sapphires: Transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of an Australian Indigenous musical film

This essay discusses transnational dimensions of the Indigenous musical film The Sapphires, based on the true story of an Aboriginal all-girls soul band that entertained American troops in the Vietnam War. It suggests that there are strong resonances between the film s story of four young Indigenous women who affirm their Indigenous identity while negotiating their way across national and cultural borders and contemporary Indigenous filmmakers operating in Australia s rapidly internationalizing mainstream screen industry. It argues that while the original Sapphires adopted the American musical genre of soul as a means of breaking free from colonial forms of social restriction and racism, The Sapphires appropriates the film genre of the musical to tell the story of this all-girls group in ways that transpose the musical into an Indigenous cultural realm. (c) 2014 (c) 2014 Taylor Francis.