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When legendary actor David Gulpilil and director Rolf de Heer decided to make a film together, Gulpilil proposed a story inspired by the ethnographic images Donald Thomson took around Arnhem Land in the 1930s. One image, reproduced here, shows men canoeing across a swamp and was re-created in the film, like many of Thomson’s photos were.
Filmed in Arnhem Land with a cast of local Indigenous Australians, Ten Canoes interweaves two tales of forbidden love and consequence, spanning thousands of years of Yolngu storytelling, and is told entirely in language.
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