Making Revisions
2024 · 11m · Australia
Directed by Patrick Waterhouse
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Warlpiri artists and British artist Patrick Waterhouse collaborate to rework colonial-era documents through Aboriginal dot painting, challenging Australia's colonial narratives.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this 'decolonial' and pat themselves on the back; what actually moves here is how the film lets the dot painting *speak back* to the archival document without needing to moralize about it—subversion through pure formal reckoning.
A bracingly precise work that understands its place in the lineage of institutional critique and collaborative practice, where the decision to let painting and archive sit in direct visual conversation becomes a considered argument about how meaning is restored, not imposed.
The real alchemy is in how Waterhouse frames the moment when the Warlpiri artists' hands enter the colonial text—one editorial choice to let the dot painting *accumulate* over the documents rather than replace them transforms the entire moral register of the piece.