Overgrown

Synopsis

Four local mob, at various disappointing stages of life, are thrown into the Community Correctional system to repay their societal debts through hard yakka.

As they dig deeper into Country, ancient and wrathful systems reemerges from burnt country, seeking punishment. Tormented by Wiradjuri Gawu-gawu* and trapped inside a bureaucratic hellhole, they are forced to reconcile with the crimes against Country that their society runs on.

Their present-day sentence unfolds alongside fragments of past resistance: the scattered reminiscence of a missing Indigenous ranger; a privately hired archaeologist spiralling into madness; rumours of a deceitful medicine man suspended between life and death; and an unnamed Black woman, deemed an outlaw, who once used her dying culture to outwit her uninvited colonisers.

Like the revolutionaries before them, the four workers come to understand that listening to Country cannot happen clean of crime, and strange, perplexing moral challenges.