Keeping Time with Rolf

There are three clocks on the wall of Rolf de Heer's Vertigo Productions, in Australia's City of Churches. They're set to Adelaide, Rome and Los Angeles time. The first and last are to be expected in an indie-film hothouse. As for the second - more on that later. But there should be a fourth. Ever since director De Heer was invited by legendary actor David Gulpilil to make a film about his home in north central Arnhem Land, the office has been running on Ramingining time. In the three years since, De Heer has been stretched physically, mentally and culturally. "I knew from the beginning that the process would be different to anything that I'd ever done before," says the award-winning director of Bad Boy Bubby, Dance Me to My Song and The Tracker, "that you basically have to throw out all the lessons you've ever learned and reinvent the way of making a film." From its first frames, Ten Canoes announces itself as a film like no other. At bird's-eye level, the camera glides across a watery landscape rarely seen other than by the 800 Yolngu inhabitants of Ramingining. We're in the heart of the Arafura Swamp, and over the alien sounds of chirrups, croaks and slithers, the laughing narration of Gulpilil can be heard describing how the landscape was formed by the Great Water Goanna, Yurlunggur. When De Heer's regular sound designer first saw a three-minute rough-cut, he knew they were on to something special. "From his head," says James Currie, "all these fragmented bits and pieces that we'd shot over the seven weeks had come together to form a shape that I'd never seen before."

Or, for that matter, heard. When Ten Canoes has its world premiere as part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts this Sunday, it will be the first feature to play out almost entirely in an indigenous Australian language (Gulpilil's intermittent narration is in English, as are the subtitles). But in a film set before Western contact - where young warrior Dayindi (Gulpilil's son Jamie) hunts for goose eggs while being told Dreamtime stories - Ganalbingu, the language of the "magpie goose people," rules. Dayindi has been coveting his older brother's young wife, and the cautionary tale Minygululu (Peter Minygululu) offers his brother while stripping trees for bark and building canoes ultimately weaves back into their own. "People talk about, What is a white director doing making an indigenous story? But I'm not," insists De Heer, 54. "They're telling the story, largely, and I'm the mechanism by which they can."

The starting point was an old black-and-white photograph of canoe-making taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson in the 1930s, which Gulpilil showed De Heer in Arnhem Land. "We need 10 canoes," said the actor, who had starred in De Heer's previous film, The Tracker (2002). Arriving at a narrative that satisfied both the Yolngu's desire for traditional storytelling and Western audiences' need for plot and pace proved a lesson in cultural navigation. Many Yolngu neither speak English nor understand movie-making: "It was conceptually outside their thinking about the world," says De Heer. The Yolgnu's only requirement was that the film respect their pre-contact culture; only through the lens of the Dreamtime could De Heer explore the tribal warfare, sorcery, and payback he was drawn to as a filmmaker. His solution is novel, weaving seamlessly between the distant past (shot in black and white like the Thomson photograph) and a Technicolor Dreamtime, all of which is overlaid by Gulpilil's witty commentary. "Once upon a time, in a land far away," he begins, before breaking into a gale of laughter.