Milpirri began in 2005 out of a relationship that by then already ran back seventeen years. Since 1988 the Melbourne based Tracks Dance Company had worked with the remote Warlpiri community of Lajamanu in the Tanami Desert, and Milpirri became their joint answer to a hard question, how a community keeps its ceremonial law alive for young people growing up between two worlds.
Milpirri: Winds of Change, a fifty four minute television documentary, was co-directed by Stewart Carter of Tracks Dance and Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick, an initiated Warlpiri law man who has led Milpirri from the community side since it began. It follows preparation for the biennial festival, in which more than one hundred and fifty Lajamanu residents, from children to elders, dance in front of banners representing the community's clans, staged deliberately as a bicultural event bringing Yapa, Warlpiri people, and Kardiya, non Warlpiri people, onto the same ground. It was released in 2014.
The film documents a public festival built for exactly this kind of outside audience, not a closed ceremony. Guruwari, the design patterns whose right to be made and shown belongs to specific people and the ceremonies they come from, are not drawn or reproduced here or in the film; what both record is that Milpirri exists, why the community built it, and what it is trying to hold onto.
Because the direction itself is shared between an outside dance company and a Warlpiri law man rather than made by either side alone, the film stands as a collaborative outside record rather than the tradition speaking only in its own voice.