By privileging Aboriginal language, Aboriginal-accented narration and the Aboriginal style of story-telling ("cascading repetition narration") in "Ten Canoes", writer, co-director and co-producer Rolf de Heer has made a film promoting indigenous Australian pride. He portrays the 'magpie goose people' of Arnhem Land as empowered and in control of their language, their culture and their lives, rather than conforming with the frequent media presentation of Aboriginals as passive victims of colonial maltreatment and disrespect. An era of idyllic well-being preceding white settlement of Australia can be imagined, and de Heer convincingly takes the viewer back to that black and white time of a thousand years ago – and suggests an even earlier more rapturous and colourful Dreamtime. In doing so, unlike other 'Aboriginal' films, he tells an authentic Aboriginal story in an authentic Aboriginal manner
