"Ten Canoes" resembles a National Geographic documentary with dramatic overtones and is sometimes hard to follow due to the thick accent of the narrator but it's nevertheless absorbing due in part to its very oddness, being a story about aboriginal Australians (though written, directed and shot by a Caucasian team headed by director Rolf de Heer). Structurally it is a story within a story about a how a tribe in the pre-colonial period handled the sudden disappearance of one of its female members. The story allows de Heer to illustrate how members of this primitive community were not so very different from ourselves in their essential human characteristics. The mere placement of a group of naked, primitive people as central characters in a fictional motion picture drama is, to Western eyes, enough to command the attention. The more or less constant narration tends to hinder dramatic development so that we never connect deeply with any of the characters yet we empathize with their predicaments. Generally speaking, it paints a sympathetic picture of a people whom fate has brutalized and who now are only beginning to recover and get back a sense of who they are and what they come from, in part through films like this one.
Review of Ten Canoes
