Starring Crusoe Kurddal and David Gulpilil. In English, Ganalbingu, and other Australian Aboriginal languages with English subtitles. Rated PG. For showtimes, please see page 58

Although it would be presumptuous for any non-indigenous person to speculate on which aspect of aboriginal culture has been most grotesquely distorted by cinematic fictions, the (mis)perceived lack of a sense of humour must rank pretty close to the top of the list. When not uttering ungrammatical threats against cavalry heroes and blond virgins, Hollywood Indians, for instance, have traditionally offered po-faced nuggets of wisdom that sound like fortune cookies translated from Esperanto. One would never guess from such movies that many First Nations people have a gift for spontaneous comic banter.

That the white invaders of Australia treated the original inhabitants as brutally as did their North American counterparts is well-known. Because the two societies share a tradition of genocide, one should probably not be surprised to discover that many of the attitudes toward the original locals are disturbingly similar. The greater the guilt, the greater the need to disparage the victim.

Although he lacks Australian Aborigine blood himself (he was born in Holland), Rolf de Heer has long tried to set the record straight in regard to his adopted homeland’s treatment of its indigenous dispossessed.

Until the release of his latest film, this engagement was most noticeable in The Tracker, a 2002 drama set in the 1920s wherein three Europeans in pursuit of an Aboriginal fugitive accused of murder (David Gulpilil, Australia’s first and only internationally recognized non-Caucasian star) show just how nasty they can be when push comes to shoot.

Ten Canoes, on the other hand, is cast in a very different key from this sombre social study. This is a cautionary tale whose moral is “Be careful what you wish for.” Set in the past, the distant past, a time so ancient it is indistinguishable from the Aboriginal Dreamtime concept, two parallel stories deal with the frustrations of young men with no wives who must suffer the presence of older men with two. Each tale is shot in a different colour scheme, and the time frames are welded together by Gulpilil’s voice-over narration. Ian Jones’s images are breathtakingly beautiful, not least because they show us isolated corners of Australia that few have ever been fortunate enough to visit.

Funny, sexy, and wise, Ten Canoes shares with Atanarjuat a sense of imaginative freedom untainted by European-imposed self-hate. It lets us know that although people might be the same, cultures are not, and that there is something exhilarating in being exposed to new ways of seeing things without the interceding filter of anthropological explanations.