Reception
Ten Canoes won the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. De Heer rejected claims he is a white director making an indigenous story: "People talk about, what is a white director doing making an indigenous story? They're telling the story, largely, and I'm the mechanism by which they can." Ten Canoes was screened at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2006 and was released nationally on 29 June 2006.
In October 2006 Ten Canoes was chosen as Australia's official entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category for the 2007 Academy Awards, thus becoming the third Australian film to be considered for the award following Floating Life in 1996 and La Spagnola in 2001.
Ten Canoes was nominated for seven Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards, of which it won six. The movie won the awards for Best Picture (Julie Ryan, Rolf de Heer producers), Best Director (Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr), Best Screenplay - Original (Rolf de Heer), Best Cinematography (Ian Jones), Best Editing (Tania Nehme) and Best Sound (James Currie, Tom Heuzenroeder, Michael Bakaloff and Rory McGregor). It was also nominated for Best Production Design (Beverly Freeman).
It won three awards from the Film Critics Circle of Australia: Best Film, Best Editing (Tania Nehme) and Best Cinematography (Ian Jones). (The latter award was a tie with David Williamson's work on Jindabyne.) The film was also nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. The documentary that aired on Australian network SBS, The Balanda and the Bark Canoes, which detailed de Heer's experiences making the film, won Best Australian Short Documentary for de Heer, Tania Nehme and Molly Reynolds. The documentary explores the interplay between cultures in a film project immersing a 'Balanda' (white man) into the intricacies of kinship systems impacting the casting of the film as well as giving some voice to the inner conflicts of indigenous peoples today caught between the world of their heritage and that of modern life.
At the end of 2006 the film stood as one of the highest grossing Australian films of that year. By October it had made just over $3,000,000 from a budget of $2,200,000.
The film ranked #72 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010.
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