Three Sisters, Women of High Degree

Three Sisters, Women of High Degree, is the result of 7 years of collaboration and filmed conversations between three Yimardoowarra Marninil, Nyikina women from the Fitzroy River, Lucy Marshall, Jeannie Wabi, and Anne Poelina, and French-Australian filmmaker Magali McDuffie.

For over 30 years, Lucy, Wabi and Anne have been implementing cultural actions to create sustainable economies in their communities for future generations, and to protect their kandri, language and culture.

Inscribing the women within their cultural landscape through their river stories, and spanning over 80 years and three generations, this film also retraces the recent history of the Kimberley through the sisters’ lived experiences of slavery on pastoral stations, and reveals the women’s agency in response to various government policies. Highlighting the use of film as a tool of empowerment, Three Sisters looks at the contemporary engagement of the women politically, at a local, national, and international level, in an increasingly neo-liberal context, with, in the background, the ever-increasing threat of massive industrialisation of the Kimberley region by multi-national mining corporations – the new colonisers.