'Origin' is this week's Star Theatre's film club selection and is a reminder of why one joins a film club. A very powerful and well-acted film that, although lengthy and a little bumpy in the timeline at times, is certainly a film and a story for our times given the confected furore by News Ltd’s media recently over comments made by ABC journalist Laura Tingle, during a panel discussion at the Sydney Writers Festival last month.
Based on the book Caste: Origins of our discontents by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson, the film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAweg5PaMuw addresses the -isms that have been historically exploited in order to divide nations and individuals into some groups believing they are more superior than others. Think Nazis v the Jews in World War ll, and India’s ‘Untouchables’ or Dalits, who are the bottom of the hierarchical population pile in that country, relegated to doing society’s least pleasant jobs. Think sorting rubbish, cleaning open sewers and sewerage, and street sweeping.
As an African-American Wilkerson naturally explores her own heritage about the racial abuse towards people of colour in the US, starting from being captured and sold into slavery. And the film doesn’t hold back. The scenes where a young boy is denied a swim in the municipal pool with his baseball team-winning mates - because of his skin colour is particularly harrowing. Pressure from the coach finally results in all the white people being asked to leave the pool, before an inflatable bed is lowered into the pool. The coloured boy is then instructed to step onto the bed but absolutely must not touch the water. He lies rigidly on the bed hardly daring to breath while it is pulled from one end of the pool to the other while the whites stand silently watching.
This is a remarkably similar scenario to that of Australian Aboriginals being excluded from public swimming pools in this country, and for the same reason: the colour of their skin. And this was just fifty or sixty years ago. It was hard to watch.
The seeds of the book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51152447-caste were sown by the murder of a young black American boy – and we learn at the end of the film that it was published in 2020 not long after the murder of George Floyd – and before the election that saw Donald Trump elected as President.
I've now got the book on request at the library. There's already a queue so I imagine there are several others who’ve also seen the film and are now keen to read the book that it’s based on. I suspect the book will be a tough read too – but an important one. The only way to achieve peace in the world is for all of us to respect each other and embrace our differences - not try to dominate or eliminate them.
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