Filmed the day before the national referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, The Ball reanimates a dusty town hall through song, dance, and poetry.
The event features working-class poems and regional stories, alongside guest opera singers from the West Australian Opera. A procession moves down the main street, led by a primary school choir from Morawa District High singing in both Widi Widi language and English—escorted by Jaxon the horse and his rider, Jess Parker.

The Ball unsettles easy assumptions about voting positions, exposes the failures of the political class, and critiques representational policymaking. It draws attention to the divide between wealth centres and the textured realities of rural agricultural life—its settler paradoxes, and the slow, uneven road to post-national and decolonial rituals.

The event is the film. Drawing from The Firemen’s Ball and early Czechoslovakian cinema, The Ball reimagines civic gatherings as sites of both satire and sincerity.