Beyond Extraction: Documentary and Regenerative Futures

15 Oct 2026
06:30pm - 09:00pm
FREE
Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, Brunswick Mechanics Institute, 270 Sydney Rd, Brunswick

Image credits: header image supplied by Joel Sherwood Spring and reference image supplied by Sanaz Sohrabi

Beyond Extraction is a screening event exploring energy, extraction and colonial image-making through artist film. The event explores Indigenous and transnational perspectives, examining how moving images shape understandings of resource extraction, land, knowledge and possible regenerative futures.

How can expanded documentary challenge extractive narratives and foster new forms of knowledge exchange? How do moving images help us imagine and build regenerative futures?

Beyond Extraction: Documentary and Regenerative Futures, features two artist films:

Diggermode (26 mins, 2022) from Wiradjuri filmmaker Joel Sherwood Spring
Scenes of Extraction (43 mins, Canada/Iran, 2023) from Sanaz Sohrabi

Professor Belinda Smaill (Monash University) will also deliver a keynote, drawing on her ARC Discovery project Remaking the Australian Environment Through Documentary Film and Television.

A post-screening conversation will explore how expanded documentary practice can challenge extractive narratives and open new forms of knowledge exchange and collective meaning-making around regenerative futures. This opens a broader transnational conversation about how moving images shape public understandings of energy, extraction, and possible futures.

Speakers

Professor Belinda Smaill

Professor Belinda Smaill researches nonfiction and documentary screen culture. Her recent work has focused on the ethical, cultural and institutional issues that pertain to the environment and biodiversity on screen. Over the last decade she has been researching issues concerning the nonhuman environment and how they relate to fact-based storytelling in film and television. This work has focused on how screen media might produce knowledge and solutions for a world facing environmental crisis. She is the Leader of the Environment and Media Research Program at Monash University.

Joel Sherwood Spring

Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri artist based in Sydney/Gadigal/Wangal lands. He works collaboratively on projects that examine ways of seeing Country through technology. His work confronts and channels both the desire for land and minerals at the core of Australian national identity and examines alternative Indigenous materialist frameworks of art and architecture towards repatriation, reparation, and return of land. Sherwood Spring is exploring the potential of art making, exhibition making, publishing, and pedagogy within what is recognized as black or Indigenous studies.

Featured Filmmaker

Sanaz Sohrabi (b.1988, Tehran) is a researcher of visual culture, and artist-filmmaker, based at Concordia University, Canada. Since 2017, Sohrabi has done extensive archival research at the British Petroleum archives to engage with the history of photography and film practices of the colonial British controlled oil operations in Iran. Sohrabi's ongoing project explores the contested historical role that visual representations of oil have played in shaping postcolonial sovereignty and resource nationalism in Iran and the Global South more broadly.

Register

This event is presented by Re-vision Ethical Futures Moving Image Network and is part of the Energy Futures events season presented by the RMIT Regenerative Futures Institute.

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Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.

Learn more about our commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

Beyond Extraction: Documentary and Regenerative Futures