As a teenager, Cornel Ozies managed a supermarket in the remote Kimberley town of Halls Creek. In his 20s, he headed home to Broome where he fell into film-making as if he was born into it. He probably was. His mother Michelle Torres, a scriptwriter and director, acted in BabaKieueria, the 1986 satire on Australian race relations. Theatre and movie star Ningali Lawford and Shari Sebberns, who played one of the four Aboriginal singers in the hit film The Sapphires, are both aunts.
Ozies has an impressive CV, which includes work as a cinematographer attachment on The Great Gatsby. But he never imagined that in his 30s, the genius for story-telling which runs through his family and the decade spent in dark edit suites, or framing the world through lenses, would lead him to learn secrets held sacred for thousands of years by his ancestors.