Ten Canoes

“Once upon a time, far, far, away... No, I’m just fooling.” So begins our narrator as we float above the forests of Australia’s Northern Territories, swiftly setting the tone for this boisterous and playful yarn. Inspired by 1930s black-and-white photographs of Aboriginal huntsmen and developed in close collaboration with the people of Ramingining, Ten Canoes manages to completely sidestep the worthiness and solemnity that can afflict this kind of project. Revelling in the pleasures of storytelling and oral history, the film’s success in combining ancient parables with weird tangents and old-fashioned bawdy humour often recalls Inuit epic Atanarjuat – The Fast Runner. After thirty years of filmmaking the versatile and ever-curious Rolf de Heer (Bad Boy Bubby, Dance Me To My Song) has finally scored a proper hit in his home country, and one that deserves to be seen abroad.

Showing with This Is My Land (dir: Ben Rivers, UK 2006, 8 mins) Portrait of Jake Williams' isolated existence in Aberdeenshire.