Several things about Ten Canoes, which I saw last night.
Firstly, the whole thing is about the longest gag I've ever seen. The layers are brilliantly nested: it's a story told within a story recounted by David Gulpilil. The nested story is, in the context of the first-level story, told over many days, and climaxes in a very simple punch-line, which makes it a cautionary tale ultimately.
As my spouse put it afterwards, the message is the old English-language maxim, "careful what you wish for." I felt the film was really quite universal. The possibility of a universal message is allowed for in the narration, where we are told that the story may help us to "live right way too," although there are also several caveats to the effect that this is a story about how things are with his people.
Obviously, it's brilliant. I don't really want to get into the issues of the extent to which this film does or does not represent cultural imperialism. It's part of a general invasion of Western culture into these communities, and like all observation, it affects what it touches; we can only hope, with consent, and in a positive way.
I felt much of the film feeling fairly depressed for extrinsic reasons to do with my own life, but I felt incredibly uplifted by the rather pessimistic conclusion, which I would tend to see as pointing to the movement by which fantasy is inevitably disappointed by reality.