80
Ten Canoes is a rare and valuable movie, providing fascinating insight into another culture without pandering or being stuffy. Seek it out -- swim if you have to.
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What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
Chicago Reader by Andrea Gronvall
Inspired by anthropologist Donald Thomson's early-20th-century photographs, this collaboration between a Western filmmaker and the native people of Ramingining is an impressive achievement of ethnographic cinema.
80
It's a fascinating immersion within a highly ritualized Stone Age oral culture that, at least according to tradition, existed almost unchanged for thousands of years before the European arrival.
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Liam Lacey
A rollicking good story set a millennium ago among Australian aborigines, Ten Canoes is one of those cultural-building exercises that genuinely entertains.
75
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
Funny, perceptive, bawdy, tragic and philosophical, pretty much everything a viewer -- or a listener -- could ask for.
83
Like a lot of folk tales, Ten Canoes peters out into something more prosaic than profound, but it flows like water, and has a deceptively gentle pull that proves hard to escape.
90
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
There is nothing more enthralling than a good yarn, and Ten Canoes interweaves two versions of the same story, one filmed in black and white and set a thousand years ago, and an even older one, filmed in color and set in a mythic, prehistoric past.
Ten Canoes is a valuable and endlessly fascinating film about the Aboriginal culture in Australia. Peter Djigirr and Rolf de Here collaborate to craft a story that teaches the audience about traditional aboriginal storytelling. Ten Canoes connects this age old art form to the 21st century unlike any other film.