Always distinctive director Rolf de Heer concocts a magically evocative adaptation of indigenous Australian oral legends of love, jealousy and revenge among brothers and tribes in an outback of the distant past.

De Heer worked intimately with an Aboriginal community to create the first feature-length film in an Aboriginal language. The world that they conjure with masterful photography and sound design is ethereal and alien -- a lush and vast landscape that's yet to collide with the West, but populated by characters paradoxically familiar, with the kind of passions and problems that transcend any human boundary. Ten Canoes, though, is anything but a dry lesson in ethnography. Narrated in English in a playful, folksy style, the film tells the story of a young man who covets the youngest of his older brother's three wives and laments his inferior position in the family. When the young wife is kidnapped, the men take revenge on a neighboring tribe they suspect is responsible, disrupting the calmness of their lives. The act also leads to a series of subplots, digressions and asides including shamans, angry wives and a few jokes about bodily functions that prove that scatological humor is timeless. The film feels like a privileged glimpse into another time and place rendered stunningly authentic by a storytelling method that's as revelatory as the story itself.