Quotes of the Day

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. 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.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• To make his one-of-a-kind film Ten Canoes, Rolf De Heer had to divide himself between the present and the Dreamtime