For the Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer, the hardest part of making his latest feature, “Ten Canoes,” was not the arduous location shooting in the outback and swamps of his country’s far-flung Northern Territory. Rather, making the tale of tribal revenge, performed by an exclusively Aboriginal cast from the Yolngu tribe of Ramingining, posed unique challenges that extended to an aspect of filmmaking most directors take for granted.

“Casting was not in my control whatsoever,” Mr. de Heer said via telephone from his production office in Adelaide. Roles had to be determined according to the strict lineage rules of the Yolngu. “The kinship relationships between two actors had to be the same as the relationships between the characters they were playing.” Compatibility determined castability.

It was a telling example of the cultural stakes involved in the pioneering feature. “Ten Canoes,” which opens Friday, is the first film to depict Aboriginal life before Western contact. For American viewers, it will be an ethnographic work as much as a drama, much like the recent Inuit epic “Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.”

In the elemental tale, set during the mythical period Aboriginals call “the old times,” tribal ritual and custom determine the repercussions when a jealous husband kills the wrong man. There follows a revenge ceremony with a kind of spear firing squad, and the movie ends with the victim performing a haunting self-valedictory ritual known as a “death dance.”

“They talk about wanting their culture to be recognized, and my sense is what that means is valued and properly represented. They wanted it to be accurate,” Mr. de Heer said of his Yolngu cast and the community they represent.

One strikingly authentic result is the film’s nested structure, which honors the Aboriginal role of storytelling. The main tale alternates with a simpler story set in actual tribal times 1,000 years ago. As a group embarks on canoes for a goose-egg hunt, one man tells the revenge tale to distract his younger companion, who is foolishly smitten with one of the older man’s wives. In addition, a frequent, playful voice-over lends the proceedings the feel of a storybook illustration being brought vividly to life.

The goose-egg hunt scenes are shot in black-and-white with a deep sense of stillness, in contrast to the rich hues and unfolding intrigue of the revenge tale. Their style and focus explicitly imitates a renowned series of photos taken by the Australian anthropologist Donald Thomson on a 1937 expedition to the region. “The photos are close to revered,” Mr. de Heer explained of their place in modern Aboriginal culture. “They expected some sort of reflection of these images, because it is part of their old-time history. And so we’d reconstruct: The composition of our photos was the actual composition of Thomson’s frame.” (The film’s title refers to a stately photo of men in canoes on a goose-egg hunt.)

This exacting attention to recreating perspectives is characteristic of Mr. de Heer, who frequently forges new techniques of representation. “The Tracker,” his grueling 2003 outback drama, suggested scenes of violence by cutting away to expressionistic paintings by the Australian artist Peter Coad. His notorious 1993 film “Bad Boy Bubby,” about an id-driven adult imprisoned in a filthy apartment by his mother, hooked microphones on the lead actor’s ears to achieve a skin-crawling firsthand perspective. Mr. de Heer also experimented with adopting the perspective of a 7-year-old girl in 1996’s “The Quiet Room.” (The latest twist on this experimentation is his follow-up to “Ten Canoes,” a black-and-white silent comedy called “Dr. Plonk.”)

The sensitive cultural explorations of “Ten Canoes” arose out of Mr. de Heer’s work on “The Tracker” with David Gulpilil, Australia’s pre-eminent indigenous actor. (Mr. Gulpilil’s career stretches back to Nic Roeg’s 1971 controversial landmark “Walkabout.”) At Mr. Gulpilil’s urging, the filmmaker became “the means by which the Yolngu achieved their ambition of making the film.” Mr. de Heer shares directorial credit with a member of the community, Peter Djigirr, who acted as master logistician and liaison.

The degree of cultural, even spiritual, investment helps explain why the film’s landscapes and settings feel more personal and livedin than the grandiose backdrops of, say, a John Wayne Western. “It’s the way they talk, their cosmology: I am the land, the land is me,” Mr. de Heer said. “The land or any depiction of it is as good as the depiction of people, and considered just as interesting.” This respectful sense of space and time also applied to the participants’ views on depicting their rituals, which might have made for a very different movie: “Even with a six-hour ceremony, they would never want anything cut.”

But Mr. de Heer, who is not Aboriginal, and Mr. Djigirr seem to have satisfied many audiences. The film was warmly received at a special screening in Ramingining, and last December it swept the 48th annual Australian Film Institute awards.

Yet for Mr. Djigirr, the production is, in a sense, far from over. As a result of the Yolngus’ complex economic system of obligations, he found himself going to extremes in his negotiations to help cast and maintain people on the production.

“We discovered that if he couldn’t get a cast member from town to come in, he would simply offer more money out of his own money,” Mr. de Heer said. “And in order to get a particular actor to come on a particular day, he had essentially adopted a child to whom he now has a lifelong obligation. We repaid all the financial debt but couldn’t do anything about the child he had adopted. That’s the degree of commitment that he had to the film.”