For those of you who are in Melbourne, remember Our Warrior: The Story of Robbie Thorpe has a screening coming up on July 23rd at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival.
I started watching this with no clue who Robbie Thorpe is. For those of us who live outside of Victoria might dismiss this as being a little Victorian/Melbourne-centric and it might be but honestly it isn’t much of a problem especially considering this is being screened as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. I’ll also admit that there was a small part of me that was expecting something that could easily be described as a ‘biography’. I found that some of the recent Australian history that was discussed in the film most notably the Camp Sovereignty protest in Melbourne that in 2006 during the Commonwealth Games to be very interesting. For the record I don’t have memories of being interested in the ’06 Commonwealth Games at the time.
The question of a treaty with Indigenous Australia could be considered as controversial and it was good to see that director Anthony Kelly didn’t take the approach of taking the audience by the throat and telling them how evil and racist they are. There are more than a few directors of narrative films who have seemingly been unable to learn that lesson.

After the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival there are screenings planned at the Institute for Post Colonial Studies in North Melbourne on 21 August. And others In Geelong, Castlemaine and a range of community screenings around Melbourne. For More Information