Traditional approaches to making color offer sustainable options to a fashion system badly in need of them and memorable cultural narratives to a world hungry for beauty and spirituality. Deep conversations with twenty-eight artisans from every part of the globe reveal their wisdom, traditions, and know-how-and suggest that we ignore what they know at our peril. The whole series will be available on SBS On Demand.True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes by Keith Recker is about artists who create color from natural materials and about the historical importance and environmental sustainability of this practice. True Colours airs over four consecutive nights during Naidoc week, at 8.30pm until Thursday 7 July on SBS and NITV. But too many are too familiar, and overall True Colours, while it has its moments, lacks vitality. Some – like the protagonist being ensnared in an investigation with shockingly personal implications – are evergreen and to be expected. Perhaps it’s a compliment, in a backhanded kind of way, that you don’t doubt True Colours’ realism – particularly its sense of community – even when the scenarios feel well-worn and overly reliant on the standard detective series playbook. Hick has a modest and uninhibited appeal, her authenticity and down-to-earth charisma at home with lines like “I just wanna have a yarn.” But when she’s given more plot-oriented dialogue, such as “I don’t think it was just an accident”, there’s a tension between the naturalism of the performance and the contrived nature of the scenario. The cultural insights are interesting, but structurally the focus of True Colours rests on procedural and noirish elements, which, while competently staged, are overly familiar – even boilerplate. The latter is relevant, plotwise, in ways that would be impertinent and spoilerific to disclose here. True Colours (which airs over four consecutive nights, during Naidoc week) also touches on issues of kinship systems, sorry business and the commodification of Aboriginal art. ‘An excellent supporting performance’ … Warren H Williams as Samuel. However, in the new century we are seeing more of them – including in Mystery Road: Origin, which contains a scene with detective Jay Swan (Mark Coles Smith) being asked, “You a policeman or a blackfella?”, to which he responds: “Why can’t I be both?” I may have broken whitefella law – not my family law.”įor a long time these kinds of issues remained virtually unexplored on Australian screens, particularly in narrative productions (one exception being the 1981 documentary Two Laws). The drama’s moral complexity peaks late in the series when (no spoilers) Toni erupts at her uncle Samuel (Williams, in an excellent supporting performance): “Don’t you hide behind our culture … you choose the cultural line when it suits you.” In another context this would play like farce, but here it’s serious and complex, pairing police procedural elements with cultural insight. Nick repeats the exact same question, which the mechanic promptly answers. On one occasion, when she asks a local mechanic a question, he flat-out ignores her, telling her white police partner, Nick (Luke Arnold): “I can’t talk to her.” In some circumstances, having a badge offers Toni no authority at all. One of the most interesting aspects of the script (written by Glynn, McGregor and Danielle MacLean) are the ways in which Indigenous customs and laws rub up against white-oriented policing.
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