Locating The Sapphires: transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of an Australian Indigenous musical film

Abstract

This essay discusses transnational dimensions of the Indigenous musical film The Sapphires, based on the true story of an Aboriginal all-girls soul band that entertained American troops in the Vietnam War. It suggests that there are strong resonances between the film's story of four young Indigenous women who affirm their Indigenous identity while negotiating their way across national and cultural borders and contemporary Indigenous filmmakers operating in Australia's rapidly internationalizing mainstream screen industry. It argues that while the original Sapphires' adopted the American musical genre of soul as a means of breaking free from colonial forms of social restriction and racism, The Sapphires appropriates the film genre of the musical to tell the story of this all-girls group in ways that transpose the musical into an Indigenous cultural realm.