Spotlight on Rolf de Heer: Bold Visions in Australian Cinema

Few filmmakers in Australia have demonstrated the range, vision, and daring of Rolf de Heer. Known for his genre-defying storytelling and deep respect for Indigenous culture, de Heer’s films push boundaries, emotionally, politically, and stylistically. His work invites audiences into stories that are provocative, often unsettling, and always deeply human.

Ten Canoes (2006), a landmark in Australian cinema, launched on Beamafilm today. It is the first feature film made entirely in Aboriginal languages (primarily Ganalbingu). Co-directed with Peter Djigirr, it unfolds as a story-within-a-story set in Arnhem Land, combining myth, morality, and traditional Yolngu storytelling. Visually rich and culturally groundbreaking, the film stands as a rare and respectful collaboration with the Yolngu people and it is no surprise that this film won the Cannes Special Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard (2006), and was also Australia's official submission to the 2006 Academy Awards (Best Foreign Language Film category). Beamafilm is now honoured to feature Ten Canoes amongst our curated Rolf de Heer collection.

The Tracker (2002), a haunting and politically charged outback drama set in 1922, is among de Heer's most powerful works. The film follows three white men and an Aboriginal tracker as they pursue an Indigenous fugitive across harsh terrain. Featuring a remarkable performance by David Gulpilil, the film critiques colonial violence and moral complicity with stark imagery, sparse dialogue, and evocative song. The Tracker is both poetic and damning, a quietly blistering masterpiece that helped cement de Heer’s reputation as one of Australia’s most fearless filmmakers.

Dingo (1991), a soulful outback fable with jazz at its heart, tells the story of an isolated Australian trumpeter who dreams of playing with a jazz legend, portrayed by Miles Davis in his only screen role. Blending musical reverie with themes of aspiration and escape, this poetic film offers one of de Heer’s most moving and understated works, featuring the rare, soulful screen presence of jazz legend Miles Davis.

The King is Dead! (2012), with a sharp comic edge, is a suburban thriller that fuses satire, suspense, and social critique. When a seemingly normal couple discovers their new neighbour is a chaotic menace, their efforts to reclaim peace take increasingly dark turns. Full of Hitchcockian tension and offbeat Aussie humour, this is de Heer in playful, genre-bending form.

Bad Boy Bubby (1993), perhaps de Heer’s most infamous and internationally acclaimed film, is a cult classic that is as confronting as it is unforgettable. The film follows a man who escapes from 35 years of captivity at the hands of his abusive mother and ventures into a strange, often brutal world. With its dark humour, unflinching visuals, and haunting soundtrack, it is a fearless exploration of innocence, trauma, and society’s contradictions. In his original director's statement, de Heer tells us that:

"I wanted to make a film about childhood, about the importance of being loved as a child. Previous research for an abandoned project on serial killers had taught me that almost without exception, serial killers have had some form of deprived childhood. Is this then an indication that perhaps the single most important thing we can do is to love our children, without abuse? The film became, for me, a plea for childhood. It also became a film about the way we judge people... visually, by superficial appearances, almost always by arbitrary societal or ethnocentric standards. Often wrongly or unfairly.

Bubby has no way of judging people...he has only met one other person in his life, on whom he is completely dependent. He has a very narrow value system, but one that is uncorrupted by television, radio, books, and pictures. He is uncorrupted by the pressure to conform, or by aspiration. He has no real basis for comparison, therefore no real basis for making judgements about people. In that sense, he is a complete innocent.

Using Bubby's non-judgemental view of the world, I was then able to begin to explore parts of it. The film is a mere perambulation through random aspects of people and society and in so being, it begins to form some pictures of the whole. The world is funny and tragic, ugly and beautiful, spiteful and forgiving, loving and hateful, honest and hypocritical. That's also how Bubby finds it, and how it deals with him. The world, or rather the people within it, teach Bubby how to be...he learns from them how to behave. It is much the same in the real world...how each of us deals with another helps determine how that other will be.

It became a film about appearances. What is beautiful? What is ugly? To whom? In what circumstances? What is innocence? What is guilt? And it became a film about belief systems...spiritual, religious, scientific, interpersonal...and how by clinging to them in order to try and make sense of the world, we are actually prevented from making sense of it. But mostly it became a film about questions rather than answers. It is a film that asks questions about the way we perceive the world and those in it, and that then causes the viewer to ask those same questions of themselves.

Much of the preceding may sound somewhat serious and of high purpose. Perhaps it is, but forgiveness for this is sought in the form of entertainment in a mass medium such as cinema...high-mindedness can be unforgivable if it is not also entertaining. That's what I've attempted to do with "Bad Boy Bubby"...ask some questions that ought to be asked occasionally, but ask them in a way that might give real pleasure to at least some in the audience. In that, I think we succeeded."

Beamafilm is also pleased to feature Rolf de Heer’s more recent reflections on Bad Boy Bubby, offering a rare look behind the scenes of this radical and enduring work:

"Twenty-two years after Bad Boy Bubby confounded everyone, including me, by winning five prizes at the Venice Film Festival... the film is still ticking away, being shown, being seen, being loved and loathed in probable equal measure. It grew out of something so small… an idea to shoot my first film at weekends a little bit at a time... That the film has 32 different cinematographers is entirely due to this beginning… I figured that if I locked the character up from birth without him having any real reference to the outside world, anything could look like anything—and we might just get away with it.

In the event, when twelve years later we did get the chance to make the film in a much more conventional way, with a budget and a shooting schedule and location agreements and the like, I thought, “Hang it. The film was structured to allow for the use of different cinematographers at different locations, let’s just do it that way.” And because the budget was low, and the material was pretty far out there, none of the investors raised any objection.

Neither did they object to another technically radical approach we had, this time to the sound. Between the idea of making the film and its actuality, I’d made three other films and learned quite a bit about sound. I’d been shocked to discover that most of the sound in what was then Dolby Stereo was, in fact, mono in origin. Spatial effects, for example, were achieved artificially, through panning a mono track.

Full of missionary zeal about what constituted real stereo and what was fake stereo, I began to think about how the real could be achieved. I found a willing ally in James Currie, sound mixer and location recordist of immense experience. We began to devise a way to record the sound binaurally, classically done by putting a matching pair of microphones in the ears of a styrofoam head, and then placing that head where you wanted the recording to be taken from. In the first instance, we were going to place the foam head on the camera, but one day I had an idea...”James, how about we put the binaural microphones on Bubby’s head?” We found a bloke who’d worked for a spy agency, miniaturising electronics, and we built Bubby an electronic wig. And almost everything you hear in the film is hence recorded entirely from Bubby’s perspective. 

Radical though these techniques were, it was the radical content...along with the performances, music, and drama...that drove the film’s success. And it is the content that has Bad Boy Bubby still playing on the big screen today, long after most films have been consigned to the dustbin of forgotten cinema.”