DVD
50 minutes, 2003 Producers: Annamax Media, LTD and Angry Eye Productions, Inc., Director: Philip Cullen
ABOUT THE FILM
The Stolen Eye is the latest and, in our opinion, the most effective of all Jane Elliott’s films documenting her ‘blue eyed/brown eyed’ diversity training exercise. This is ironic because unlike the others, it is not set in America whose black/white racial dynamic gave birth to the technique. Instead Elliott brings together a group of Aborigines and white Australians for an unusually dramatic and candid encounter.
The Aborigines are frank and eloquent in revealing the story of the expropriation of their lands by European settlers and the deliberate attempts to destroy their culture through government-sponsored assimilation programs. The whites seem genuinely surprised and shocked by the pain they have inflicted. American diversity trainers may find the film helpful because it removes the experience of oppression from the familiar American racial terrain to a more universal, yet less well-trod landscape.
Viewers of The Stolen Eye will feel less defensive and freer to discuss their own experiences of discrimination as analogous but not redundant to those of the film’s participants. This is a must-buy for any of Jane Elliott’s many admirers.
