Culture is our future: the constitutive role of African Australian film

'Culture is our Future' is one example of an emerging body of film and video by and about African Australians, and in which ethics and aesthetics sometimes compete. Australian media representations of African Australians have been persistently negative, and many look to the ability of film and video to represent a counter-narrative in the coconstruction of cultural and subcultural identities. Drawing on Appadurai's cultural imaginary and mediascapes, this article will contextualise these films in a consideration of larger 'filmic diasporas' which represent the diversity and richness of African communities emerging in multiple diasporic locations (particularly Australia), and competing within multiple aesthetics. Simultaneously, this critique interrogates how these examples of gender and race may also be used as 'mechanisms of exclusion', and how African Australians remain 'constitutively visible' despite mainstream media attempts to render them invisible