A really fine film. Rolf de Heer (who did the very, very, very different Bad Boy Bubby) here works with Peter Djigirr and the people of Ramingining to shape a story that recounts a distant cultural past and evokes a distant storytelling tradition. The film has two frames: as the camera languorously pans over and through remote Arnhem land in northern Australia, a narrator talks to us of his ancestors and of stories told; we eventually come upon a group of men, making canoes to hunt geese, one of whom begins to tell his younger brother a tale of misplaced love in the distant past; the ‘central’ story is that tale told, in the tale told. (And even in that told, when characters imagine or hypothesize about what has happened or might happen, we get enactments–stories unfolding within the story, within a story.) The film moves back and forth, playing with our expectations (the narrator laughing at our impatience). Continue reading Ten Canoes