The making of a film by consensus...

I am tracing a 2006 documentary directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr entitled, Ten Canoes. It was filmed entirely in an Indigenous Aboriginal language on location in the Northern Territory of Australia's remote Arafura Swamp. But, most incredibly it was created by Rolf de Heer and the people of Ramingining, working in consensus.

Click for a 22-page background PDF, well-worth reading. There is a YouTube short, non-embeddable, that provides a glimpse of the humor and authenticity of the production. Ten Canoes evolved out of another award-winning Australian film, The Tracker, produced in 2002, which starred Indigenous performer (dance, film, theatre), David Gulpilil.

"The Thompson Times," refer to the memories of the past, retained by the Yolngu people through a set of photos taken by Dr. Donald Thomson, an anthropologist who worked in central and north-eastern Arnhem Land in the mid-1930. The photos, including one of a group of ten canoeists on an egg-hunting expedition, became the means of creating the film's plot.

The backgrounder explains, "Nowadays life is very different for the people of Ramingining. There is a supermarket and a takeaway shop. People live in houses with plumbing and television, and do their banking over the Internet," but they remember and celebrate the Thompson times. Ten Canoes revives those memories, enabling a people to revive and reanimate their past through storytelling.

Both The Tracker and Ten Canoes are available from Amazon.