Playfully didactic and wittily digressive, Ten Canoes is about aboriginal storytelling inside storytelling, roaming the Australian swampland and finding not one story but many. We think that the first story, filmed in black and white, is that of a young aboriginal man in love with his brother’s young second wife, but before that drama can begin the man’s brother decides to tell his naďve sibling a moral story about their ancestors in a similar situation. Directors Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr weave back and forth in time, from the black and white story of a hundred years ago—taking place as the brothers and their tribe make a long journey to build canoes and hunt for goose eggs—to the story, shot in color, of their ancestors many, many generations ago. If this set-up were not potentially confusing enough, the Storyteller (David Gupilil), who narrates not only the first story and the story-within-the-story but the film itself as a collection of stories, takes wry pleasures in the back-and-forthing and many diversions the stories take, joking about how long they take to get to the point. What one thinks will be a simple lesson illustrated about infidelity and coveting something that is not yours rapidly branches off as the tale the elder brother tells of the infatuated brother of eons ago becomes distracted by a myriad of events happening to the ancestor’s tiny tribe: the fearful visit of a stranger who is possibly a sorcerer, the disappearance and possible kidnapping of a wife, a war party sent to retrieve her, accidental murder, honey-hunting, and elaborate rituals of vengeance and death. As the story becomes more and more complicated (growing from roots to a tree with many branches, the Storyteller comments), and the camera weaves around the tribal camp and the surrounding area with a fluid and mobile ease as if each turn it takes around the landscape may find another branch to the story, Ten Canoes takes on an air both light-hearted and humorous—though not without its moments of pain—as the initial moral of the story becomes overwhelmed by the pleasure of finding so many other stories, jokes (many, if not most, surprisingly dirty), lessons, suspense, and humanity in even smallest situation. As such, it is understandable that the narrative begins to get a bit slack, especially as the changes in color (going so far as to blend the black and white of the first story with the color of the second to create a third space of storytelling, that of imagined possible branches, such as when the men of the tribe wonder what happened to the missing wife) and the searching camera start out as clever ways of both distinguishing and finding new tales but as techniques to tell the rest of the film threaten a wearisome sameness to the look of the story. Luckily the film is full of a warmth and playfulness both in tone and in compassion for its characters that allows it to be not just an inspired look at the expansive and inventive yet humble and self-deprecating storytelling practices of this aboriginal tribe, but also transcend the didactic burden of many parables with an understated ease by de Heer and Djigirr along with their warm and funny cast, finding much that is joyously, humorously human wrapped inside the many layers of stories of Ten Canoes.