Times may change over the centuries but a good fart joke never gets old. That's just one lesson to be learned from Ten Canoes, an enjoyably bawdy and stylistically inventive collaboration between director Rolf de Heer and the members of the Yolngu community in the Arnhem Land, a swampy stretch of Australia's Northern Territory. Like an Aussie equivalent to Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), it's a rare and exciting film that presents an Aboriginal culture from an insider's vantage, creating a view heretofore unseen on screen.

Reinventing and reordering the vocabulary of cinema as they see fit, de Heer and his collaborators – including co-director Peter Djigirr, seen here as a canoeist – hew closely to Yolngu storytelling traditions. Though Ten Canoes is ostensibly a cautionary tale about coveting other men's wives, the narrative soon becomes a thicket of stories within stories that are further interrupted by amusing digressions, a useful primer on canoe building and the aforementioned incidents involving the passing of wind. Anything but a staid exercise in ethnographic filmmaking, it's unique and thoroughly engaging.