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Ten Canoes

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Australia · 2006
1h 30m
Director Rolf de Heer, Peter Djigirr
Starring Crusoe Kurddal, Jamie Gulpilil, Richard Birrinbirrin, David Gulpilil
Genre Adventure, Comedy, Drama

In Australia's Northern Territory, an aboriginal man tells us a story of his people and his land. The story is about their ancestors, an older man, Minygululu, who has three wives and realizes that his younger brother Dayindi may try to steal away the youngest wife.

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What are people saying?

Nina Gallagher Profile picture for Nina Gallagher

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.

What are critics saying?

80

Empire by

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.

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

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

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.

83

The A.V. Club by Noel Murray

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.

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