Grant Leigh Saunders

WhiteBLACKatcha is an Aboriginal LITTLE BRITAIN meets ANGRY BOYS- Raw, Grotesque and bloody funny.

A feature film about two housemates who both go through massive life changing traumas to find themselves completely transformed, one for the better and one not so good.

A short film about homelessness.

This long awaited Australian film is about the social justice issues facing Aboriginal communities in Australia imagined through the lens of First Nations Hip Hop. The film follows the journey of Sonboy, a young Aboriginal rapper from The Block in Redfern, once the black political and cultural heart of Sydney. Through a rich historical archive of Redfern and the lyrics of one of its children, this hybrid of essay and observational documentary film invites the audience into a place once feared and loathed by outsiders but loved and now mourned by generations of First Nations and Culturally and Racially Marginalised families originally drawn from communities all around Australia with an old dream to make it in the big city. The Block was purchased to socially house poor and working-class Aboriginal families through a grant by the Whitlam Government in 1973 to the Aboriginal Housing Company. It became the home of the Aboriginal community-controlled sector with the establishment of the first Aboriginal Medical Service, Legal Service, Black Theatre, Radio Redfern, Aboriginal Dance Theatre and it was the epicentre of black activism, where many protests took place including the infamous Redfern Uprising in 2004. Under decades of public pressure from police harassment, a powerful lobby group of middle-class white landlords with an appetite for better property prices on top of covertly planned obsolescence, The Block finally crumbled, eaten up by private developers for the development of student housing, a new business district and “affordable housing” for successful First Nations family applicants, without a criminal record. In the rubble of his disintegrating Hood, Sonboy produces his first EP at the local community centre, simply titled ‘Kid from The Block’. This film is about what this recording has to say about Australian colonialism and its last frontier, the “black heart of Sydney” or Sydney’s “black ghetto”, The Block Redfern.