Existentialist philosophy, in particular the work of Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, was crucial to early postcolonial theorising and, as demonstrated in the work of Brendan Hokowhitu, continues to be an important perspective for understanding Indigenous postcolonial experience. Existentialism is a valuable tool in the on-going attempt to gain clarity about the nature of racist oppression and ways of overcoming it. We focus on two films by Warwick Thornton: Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017) that together form a study of an Indigenous existentialism, and in contrasting ways illustrate both the difficulty of, and possibility of, emergent transcendent agency in postcolonial environments.
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