Keeping Time with Rolf

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If there's an edge to Gulpilil's laugh, there's good reason. Shot in a crocodile-infested lagoon just after last year's wet season, Ten Canoes was as thrilling in the making as it is on screen (its filming will be the subject of an SBS documentary, Eighteen Canoes, to be aired close to the film's Australian release in June). For up to seven hours a day, director and crew would wade through thick swamp, with crocodile spotters on platforms above. "It really was the leeches getting you from the waist down; mosquitoes from above the waist," says De Heer, "and they'd be yelling out, There's a big one coming!" Sound designer Currie was confined to the relative safety of a boat, but even here his capabilities were pushed to the limit. "It was a physical and mental feat to make Ten Canoes," he says. "A logistic, artistic feat. Rolf is a supreme dreamer."

Helping translate that dream beyond Ramingining time - and the reason for the Rome clock at Vertigo Productions - is Italian producer Domenico Procacci. First brought together on De Heer's breakthrough Bad Boy Bubby (1993), "he and Domenico got on like a house on fire," recalls Currie. A darkly comic fable about an idiot savant's reintroduction to the world, which we see and hear through his ears and eyes, Bad Boy took out the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival and set in motion one of the film world's most unusual partnerships. Without Procacci's investment and clout, it's doubtful that films like Dance Me to My Song or Alexandra's Project would have been made, let alone invited to screen in competition at Cannes and Berlin.

Currie tells how, after The Tracker was shot, Procacci stayed on in Adelaide for Christmas, when he asked De Heer if he had any more scripts to shoot: "And Rolf said, 'No, but I can get you one in a week.' So he sent it to him, Domenico read it on the plane back to Italy, finished it by Singapore, and rang him up and said, 'We'll finance this, yes, no problem.' " That film was Alexandra's Project (2003), and it's hard to think of a more confronting Australian film. About a disgruntled wife who gets revenge on her feckless husband by presenting him with a shocking video confessional on his birthday,

Alexandra's Project is at times painful to watch - but then again, subjects like this don't often get a look-in. The same could be said for Dance Me to My Song (1998), in which De Heer explores the emotional and sexual life of a woman with cerebral palsy. De Heer says his Italian connection "has made it easier to make the sorts of films I like to make." Which brings us back to the other wall clock: Adelaide. At first it might seem strange that Australia's riskiest filmmaker should choose to reside in this relatively sleepy hollow. But as with his seemingly free-form films, nothing in De Heer's life is without a purpose.

After migrating to Sydney from his native Holland when he was eight, "that was a tough time in primary school and high school," recalls friend Currie, "so Rolf focused on becoming the best English speaker he could." That single-mindedness was parlayed to filmmaking when De Heer was accepted into the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. After graduating, he found the going tough. An early children's feature was followed by a sci-fi thriller, and then, after an aborted film in Indonesia, De Heer began living in Canberra. It was there he received a phone call from his loyal sound designer, offering him a permanent office in Adelaide. "It's off the center a bit," admits Currie, "but he has everything at his beck and call." Indeed, with the nearby infrastructure of the South Australian Film Corporation, where such seminal pictures as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Storm Boy were made, De Heer has found his perfect filmmaking home. With the transgressive, sometimes dangerous nature of his work, one senses De Heer enjoys working below the radar. "He opens your eyes all the time," says Currie, "and you can never ever pick what's going to happen next." True to form, De Heer is just polishing off the script for his latest project, Dr. Plonk, a silent comedy he intends shooting on a vintage hand-cranked camera. If nothing else, De Heer is up for a challenge. "Filmmaking's a terribly difficult thing to do well," he says. "And if I'm doing the same thing all the time, it becomes just bloody hard work. But if I'm doing something completely different each time, it's a whole new voyage of discovery."

Which brings us back to Ramingining time. Happy as he is with Ten Canoes ("I love it dearly - I look at it and think, This is a small miracle"), De Heer is just as proud of the effect the film will have on the lives of the Yolngu. "One of the great things at the end of the shoot was that Minygululu had picked out the tree that he was going to make his canoe from the next year," says the director, "and he'd picked out the route of his journey." For audiences too, Ten Canoes will map out new realms of understanding.