Molly Reynolds directs this documentary in which Gulpilil gives us first-hand insight into the confusions and chaos that occur in the clash between Yolngu culture and White Australia: "No one from any government has ever known our language. ... How can they know us?" IMDB: Australian Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil (Charlie’s Country) returns to his Arnhem Land hometown with filmmaker Molly Reynolds to explain ‘what happened to my culture when it was interrupted by your culture’.

De Heer visited David in Berrimah jail and persuaded him to make this semi-autobiographical film, which won him Best Actor for Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard category. His portrait of Charlie, the impoverished 60-year-old who once danced for the Queen, is authentic, heartbreaking and suffused with dignity and his indomitable spirit. IMDB Blackfella Charlie is out of sorts. The intervention is making life more difficult in his remote community, what with the proper policing of whitefella laws now. So Charlie takes off, to live the old way, but in so doing sets off a chain of events in his life that has him return to his community chastened, and somewhat the wiser.

Gulpilil gives dignity to this “Ozploitation” classic with its largely stock and ethnographically erroneous portrayal of the First Nations. In an on-set promo, its dazed and confused Hollywood star Dennis Hopper inadvertently malapropped an ideal description for these fictional people: “aboriginaries”. IMBD Synopsis: The true story of Irish outlaw Daniel Morgan, who is wanted, dead or alive, in Australia during the 1850s.

Despite or because of his single line of dialogue, Gulpilil as the tracker Moodoo, is by far the most complex character in Phil Noyce’s politically important film, made at the height of Australia’s ‘history wars’, which brought world attention to the stolen generation. His tragedy, as an indentured servant, and sly subversiveness, are communicated by his face and body language alone. IMDB In 1931, three aboriginal girls escape after being plucked from their homes to be trained as domestic staff and set off on a journey across the Outback.

Unforgettable as Fingerbone Bill, this was the first of many occasions when David had the whole world under his spell. A hit even in China and the USSR, here its deep and lasting impact on a young Indigenous generation is less widely known: As a girl, Natasha Wanganeen, now an actor herself, saw him on a TV set at Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission, and thought “he’s like me, I’m like him. And it made me feel good… he let me know I had a place here…Watching him be so happy and free and such a larrikin. That’s exactly us!” IMDB Mike is a lonely Australian boy living in a coastal wilderness with his reclusive father. In search of friendship, he encounters an Aboriginal native loner, and the two form a bond in the care of orphaned pelicans.

One of Australia’s most important films, the first in an Aboriginal language, is an all Yolngu work, facilitated by Rolf de Heer in close collaboration with Gulpilil, who narrates in inimitable fashion. The New York Times was enthralled by the playful wit and great yarn, but the death-dance sequence also offers the most profound insight into ancient human culture ever shot. IMDB: In Australia's Northern Territory, a man tells us a story of his people and his land. It's about an older man, Minygululu, who has three wives and realizes that his younger brother Dayindi may try to steal away the youngest wife.

A tracker again, but this time David is in a lead role. Rolf de Heer’s story, on one level a prequel to Rabbit Proof Fence, is more mythic, with archetypal characters and the at once distancing and heightening use of Peter Coad’s paintings and Archie Roach’s singing. It’s one of the great cinematic performances: his mock servile, bitterly ironic exchanges with Gary Sweet slowly crescendo to a finale that reveals him as a figure of godlike moral authority. Somewhere in Australia in the early 20th century outback, an Aboriginal man is accused of murdering a white woman. Three white men are on a mission to capture him with the help of an experienced Indigenous man.

David (credited as Gumpilil) debuts in Nicolas Roeg’s extraordinary visual poem. The moment this charismatic and handsome 16-year-old strides into view, adorned with the lizards he’s just killed, is breathtaking. In some ways the symbolic burden he has carried since began here: does he represent the essence of Australia or the exotically Other? Two city-bred siblings are stranded in the Australian Outback, where they learn to survive with the aid of an Aboriginal boy on his "walkabout": a ritual separation from his tribe.