For Australian director Rolf de Heer, Ten Canoes -- his acclaimed Aboriginal story-about-a-story -- began with a 70-year-old photo.
De Heer had been conferring with his favourite indigenous actor David Gulpilil (a star of his recent film The Tracker) about making a real aboriginal story in Gulpilil's hometown of Ramingining in Australia's Northern Territory.
"He'd said 'You've got to come up here and make a film with my mob,'" de Heer recalls. "I'd been there four days, and just before I left, David came in and said 'We need 10 canoes!'
"I said 'David, we don't even know what this film is gonna be about. How can we need 10 canoes?' And he said 'Ahhh!' as if I was a complete idiot, wandered off and came back a half an hour later with this dusty blue plastic folder that he had in his humpy (shelter).
"And he opened it up in front of me, and I took one look at the photograph inside and I said 'You're right. We need 10 canoes.' Because it was this photograph of 10 men on the swamp with their canoes, standing there holding on to the poles."
The photo, circa 1937 by anthropologist Donald Thompson, "was so cinematic, and spoke of a world that, if we could enter it, would be extraordinary."
Narrated by Gupilil, Ten Canoes begins 1,000 years ago as a tale of 10 canoeists searching for goose eggs, when the leader Minygululu (Peter Minygululu) discovers his brother Dayindi (Gulpilil's son, Jamie) lusts after his third wife. Calmly he tells him a story, set thousands of years earlier, of another foraging party led by Ridjimiraril (Crusoe Kurddal), whose brother Yeeralparil (also Jamie Gulpilil) also has a crush on one of his three wives.
What follows is a lengthy, meandering, funny and tragic story that could be summarized as "be careful what you wish for," if indeed Aboriginal culture had any use for summarizing.
In fact, however, de Heer created much of the story himself, from bits of folklore and actual news stories (including one about a couple of stumblebums who murdered the wrong man).
Other aspects of this evocative piece of storytelling cinema were out of his hands --like, say, the casting. "Jamie was always going to be in it. And the part for the 'honey-man' Birinbirin (Richard Birrinbirrin) was created for him because he was an important person in the community.
"For the rest of it, they did largely cast themselves. The individuals in the photograph are known to the community and everybody in the community is related to somebody or other. So Bobby Boonigal, for example, would say 'I'm playing him because he's my grandfather.' End of story.
"For the rest of the casting, there were tremendous difficulties because of the complexity of the kinship system. The onscreen relationships of the actors had to be consistent with the relationship between the characters, because there's no concept of fiction in their culture. If it's up on the screen, it has to be as it is in life."
And all that was before they began shooting in the Arnhem wetlands, with leeches, mosquitoes and games of tag with four-metre-long salt-water crocodiles.
De Heer managed to keep his feet dry for his followup, an homage to silent film comedies called Dr. Plonk, "a black-and-white silent comedy in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. We shot with a handheld camera, with all kinds of chases and kicks in the bum and slips on banana skins." The director hopes to have it at this year's Toronto International Film Fest.
Meanwhile, the spirit of Ten Canoes lives on. Right now, de Heer is back in Ramingining helping assemble 12 Canoes -- a web site project "with a sh--load of stuff different people wanted in the film and didn't get, contemporary stuff and God knows whatever else. I wanted this film to work for the mob and their kids, and I wanted it to be seen all around the world, and that has happened."
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