Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 34, Issue 2, pp. 163–165, ISSN 1058-7187, online 1548-7458. © 2018 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12171. Film Review We Don’t Need a Map Directed by Warwick Thornton, 2017, 85 minutes, color. Distributed by Ronin Films, Australia. https://www.roninfilms.com.au Rowena Potts New York University We Don’t Need a Map opens with a provocation. “G’day Australia. How you goin’?” Australian Aboriginal cin- ematographer, filmmaker, and artist Warwick Thornton asks, in voiceover. We hear children singing the nation- al anthem and see an inky black cosmos pierced by tiny, racing splinters of light. These could be stars, we realize, if we were traveling through space at a great speed. “We are standing here with our chest out, wrapped in the Australian flag and the Southern Cross,” Thornton muses. He is referring to the most distinctive constel- lation in the Southern Hemisphere, also a feature of the national flag. It is a symbol that has recently been co-opted in the service of a xenophobic nationalism in Australia. “Are we a monoculture with a potato up our bum? Are we worried that someday someone’s gonna steal our barbecues and beer?” Thornton’s tone is ir- reverent, his language idiomatic, and he is speaking to a non-Indigenous Australian audience. A feverish title sequence follows, rapid cuts propelled by the tempo of punk rock. Backlit shots of metal figurines, including a horse and rider rearing over the camera, are played at dizzying speed. Light trails from traffic, and landscapes in time-lapse are juxtaposed with handheld shots of the Southern Cross on flags, on bumper stickers, and tat- tooed on a man’s pale shoulder. Thunder claps, sparks fly, and dogs growl. The result is unsettling: things are out of balance; something is not right. The final two im- ages are of a small Aboriginal child sitting in a canoe, crying with rage, and two metal dingoes, animated by an invisible puppeteer (Thornton, as the film will soon make clear), fighting on the sand. Commissioned by Australia’s National Indigenous Television (NITV), with support from the government- funded Screen Australia, We Don’t Need a Map addresses Thornton’s grave concern that the Southern Cross is becoming “the new swastika”—a symbol weaponized to promote a white national identity that excludes recent immigrants, refugees, and Indigenous people. Thornton, a Kaytej man from Alice Springs in Australia’s North- ern Territory, directed and co-scripted the documentary with producer Brendan Fletcher. Principal cinematog- raphy was conducted by Thornton, who was assisted by his son, Dylan River—a talented filmmaker in his own right. Thornton plays a dynamic, performative role in a film that takes shape around his personal quest to understand the contested nature of a constellation whose meaning continues to evolve. The film combines formal and informal interviews shot in the homes and workplaces of Thornton’s interlocutors, playful reenact- ment scenes with metal figurines and puppets, and strik- ingly beautiful observational sequences filmed on the traditional lands of Australia’s First People. It is tightly edited and loosely structured, with an improvisatory roughness that allows it to chart complex cultural and political terrain without offering easy solutions. Following race riots that took place in Cronulla, Sydney, in 2005, the Southern Cross acquired a particu- larly racist and anti-immigrant connotation. As Muslim Australian hip-hop artist Omar Musa wearily says to Thornton in an interview, “I see the Southern Cross as a symbol that is dangerous for people like me, however I’m defined.” Yet, for Aboriginal people, the Southern Cross is imbued with profound spiritual and ancestral significance. These stars, as Indigenous poet, film- maker, cultural activist, and scholar Romaine Moreton points out to Thornton, “are not just ideas or abstract symbols.” Rather, they embody Indigenous knowledge systems and creation stories, providing the foundation for an alternative, deeply relational way of being in the world. “We are in kinship with country,” Moreton explains. “We are in kinship with animals, we are in kinship with plants, with mountains. We are in kinship with the constellations.” This ontology is as unfamiliar to the white national- ists who tattoo the Southern Cross on their bodies today as it was to the British settlers who began their invasion of Aboriginal land in 1788. That white nationalism is