Ten Canoes (2007)

ABORIGINAL IDEA Indigenous Australian tribespeople portray their forebears in Ten Canoes, de Heer's fascinating cross-cultural experiment

The time is simultaneously the distant tribal past and an even older age of myths, too, in Ten Canoes, a boldly inventive experiment in cross-cultural filmmaking from director Rolf de Heer. His actors are Yolngu people in Australia, who play their own ancestors during a season of canoe building, goose-egg hunting, and storytelling. The movie — the first entirely in Australian Aboriginal languages — is a marvel of warm collaboration and shared jokes about husbands and wives, shot both in dreamscape color and pristine black and white. A