Rolf & David on set of their latest collaboration Charlie’s Country.

Rolf de Heer’s Charlies Country received an extended standing ovation at its Cannes Un Certain Regard screening on Thursday 22nd May. The screening was attended by director/writer/producer Rolf de Heer, producer/actor Peter Djigirr, producer Nils Erik Nielsen, executive producers Domenico Procacci and Sue Murray, and cinematographer Ian Jones ACS.
 
Rave reviews followed soon after with Hollywood Reporter’s critique ‘Ever since his indelible first appearance at age 16 in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, David Gulpilil to a large extent has been the defining face onscreen of the Indigenous Australian. Now 60, the Aboriginal actor and traditional dancer teams for the third time with director Rolf de Heer – following The Tracker and Ten Canoes – on Charlie’s Country, inarguably the most personal project of their collaboration. Equal parts ethnographic and poetic, this eloquent drama’s stirring soulfulness is laced with the sorrow of cultural dislocation but also with lovely ripples of humour and even joy… the film’s observations about spiritual resilience in the face of white colonization and irreconcilable societal imbalance enrich it with emotional universality. It’s the most affecting depiction of contemporary Aboriginal experience since Warwick Thornton’s Samson & Delilah.’
 
Audience-members waited in line to speak with producer/actor Peter Djigirr following the standing ovation. A common theme expressed to him was the overwhelming importance of maintaining the culture of his people, and the universality of the story. They identified their cultural origins and were as diverse as European, South American, African and South East Asian.
 
Praise for the standout performance by screen legend David Gulpilil in the lead role of Charlie included Variety hailing Gulpilil as ‘an actor capable of mischievousness and gravitas, often within the same shot’, and Screen International saying ‘David Gulpilil crowns his career with a mesmeric portrait.’
 
Gulpilil’s legendary screen career, now into its fifth decade, has been credited with shifting the Australian cinema landscape in its representation of indigenous characters on screen. One of Australia’s best known actors, Gulpilil’s films are a roll call of some of the most renowned works in Australian cinema history, including the top two highest grossing Australian films of all time,Crocodile Dundee (1986) and Australia (2008). Following Walkabout, Gulpilil soon starred alongside Dennis Hopper in Mad Dog Morgan (1976), in the AFI Best Film winner Stormboy (1976) and the Peter Weir thriller The Last Wave (1977). More recently he has starred in Philip Noyce’s Golden Globe® nominated Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), Catriona Mckenzie’s Satellite Boy (2012) and John Hillcoat’s The Proposition which screened at both Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festivals.
 
Written together by Rolf de Heer and David Gulpilil, Charlies Country is the story of Blackfella Charlie, who is getting older and is out of sorts. The government’s intervention is making life more difficult on his remote community, what with the proper policing of whitefella laws that don’t generally make much sense, and Charlie’s kin seeming more interested in going along with things than doing anything about it. So Charlie takes off, to live the old way, but in doing so sets off a chain of events in his life that has him return to his community chastened, and somewhat the wiser.
 
Charlies Country is the fourth film from award-winning writer/director/producer Rolf de Heer to premiere in Official Selection at Cannes. His first two features to screen at Cannes, The Quiet Room (1996) and Dance Me To My Song (1998), both screened In Competition.
 
Charlies Country will be released nationally in Australian cinemas on July 17.