Carrying ancestral currents: kinship, country and knowledge in In My Blood It Runs

This article examines how In My Blood It Runs (2019), directed by Maya Newell in collaboration with Arrernte and Garrwa families, constructs a cinematic ontology grounded in relational epistemology, kinship, and Country. Rather than documenting a child’s struggle within a Western schooling system, the film enacts Aboriginal ways of knowing through embodied perspective, sonic immersion, and collaborative ethics. Centred on ten-year-old Dujuan Hoosan, recognised in his community as a healer, the film reveals how knowledge, identity and spirit are carried ‘in the blood’ and remain inseparable from land and ancestral presence. Through low camera placement, sensory attention and an observational style aligned with Indigenous media protocols, the film privileges embodied perception over explanatory narration. Drawing on scholarship by Ginsburg, Barclay, Moreton-Robinson, Rose and others, the article argues that the film resists extractive documentary traditions by foregrounding collaboration, opacity and relational responsibility. In My Blood It Runs ultimately articulates survivance: a mode of active presence that persists despite institutional pressures and colonial infrastructures. The film becomes not a representation of Aboriginal knowledge but a cinematic practice that inhabits it, inviting viewers to witness without possession.