Night cries: A rural tragedy

Tracey Moffatt's seventeen-minute, 35mm film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) catapulted the director onto the international stage. Born out of a distinct aesthetic vision and confidence as a marked departure from the documentary-realist representations of Aboriginality that had characterised Australian mainstream filmmaking up until its year of release, Moffatt's film can be understood as a juncture between a host of traditions in Australian landscape painting, particularly that of Albert Namatjira, in Hollywood melodrama, and in avant-garde production and sound design and cinematic acts of telling ghost stories.