What I mean here by ambition falls generally into three categories – thematic, narrative/formal, and stylistic – and very dull such a listing sounds. But it is the practice that matters, and the six films I have in mind are all exciting in at least one of these ways; more often than not, however, they embrace all three. When one thinks back to the early years of the Australian film revival – when we were excited by the mere fact of stories of obvious local connection, by hearing on screen regularly, as had not been the case for decades, Australian idioms and accents, by seeing recognisably Australian rural and urban vistas – or even to 2004, when one film (Somersault) scooped the pool at the AFI Awards, it is clear that something much more creatively ambitious has been going on in the 2006 line-up.

Who, in the 1970s, or indeed at any time in the following thirty years, would have conceived of a film spoken entirely in Aboriginal languages, requiring subtitles for the large audiences that were going to be excited by Ten Canoes? Aboriginal life was generally represented as a primitive, often squalid affair that happened at the margins of white settlement. Now, in Rolf de Heer’s beautiful and moving film, it is what the film is about. This is a film that insists on the notion of storytelling, though not necessarily the modes of narrative white audiences are used to. It embeds one story in another; it moves between colour and black and white to distinguish two strands – and two times, one long ago, the other unimaginably long ago. The film’s interest isn’t, either, liberally ethnographic, though it takes its inspiration from Donald Thompson’s black-and-white photographs of the 1930s.

What is so bold is the way de Heer simply places his viewers, his largely white viewers presumably, in an utterly alien setting and demands that they see the lives represented there as a norm. He has always been more daring than most Australian directors, has never wooed us with predictable ways of confronting experience, but in telling this particular pair of stories, set in a landscape that offered daunting logistic challenges, he has gone beyond the kinds of demands even he has made in such earlier films as Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Tracker (2002).

Who would have thought in the palmy 1970s that we should see Macbeth adapted to the milieu of Melbourne’s gangland wars? True, Neil Armfield had filmed his well-regarded stage production of Twelfth Night (1987), but the film remained a record of the theatrical occasion rather than a new enterprise, and received only limited distribution. Geoffrey Wright’s approach to Macbeth doesn’t come via the stage, and it doesn’t aim for theatrical virtues. Its crucial boldness is in combining the visual sheen of dark streets and clubs, and leafy suburban and hillside hideaways, with the shock of the aural. While Wright has espoused a species of realism in matters of setting and ambience, he has also opted to retain the iambic pentameters of the original (unlike the feeble British gangster version, Joe MacBeth, 1955). As if that weren’t bold enough, Wright has not enjoined on his cast an all-purpose Queen’s English articulation: there is a diversity of flat Australian vowels intelligently uttering verse most often associated with a theatrical delivery. What you gain is a strong sense that these actors, enacting criminals of various kinds and degrees of depravity, know what they are talking about. Not everything works: the ‘battles’ at the beginning and the end, frantically shot and edited, are less clear than they are in the play, where there are only words to rely on. However, so much does work extraordinarily well that one forgives this. In large thematic preoccupations, such as the stress on fathers and sons (Macbeth’s sonlessness is poignantly encapsulated in an opening image), and in small, local effects, one is struck by the freshness of the director’s approach and by the aptness of the playing. Purists may well be beside themselves, and rather foolish-looking pairs they may make.

Macbeth isn’t the only ambitious adaptation currently showing on Australian screens. It took real breadth of imagination from director Ray Lawrence and screenwriter Beatrix Christian to envisage Raymond Carver’s minimalist short story ‘So Much Water, So Close to Home’ as relocated to the Jindabyne area and the Snowy Mountains. (It was previously used by Robert Altman as one strand of his remarkable ensemble piece, Short Cuts [1993]; Altman merely shifted the action to Los Angeles and its environs.) However, Jindabyne is not just a matter of geographical migration but of making a richly textured ‘Australian’ narrative from the ‘facts’ of Carver’s story. The latter is undeniably evocative in its terse chronicle of a fishing weekend that goes wrong and in the ensuing moral upheaval in the domestic life of one of the men who chose to keep quiet about a body in a river and proceeded with their weekend holiday. Lawrence and Christian have retained this powerful narrative skeleton, imbued it with wrenching implications for a wider range of relationships, and allowed the effects to resonate not merely into the Jindabyne community but into a larger area of Australian guilt. The dead girl is Aboriginal, and the efforts of Claire, the wife of Stewart, one of the fishing blokes, to establish contact with the girl’s people, who live on the outskirts of the town, leads the film to a moving dénouement where nothing is settled and where nothing will stay the same. It works by metaphoric extension quietly but purposefully to arraign this country at large for its neglect of its indigenous population, and for colluding in the hiding of morally reprehensible attitudes and actions.

In thematic terms, there have been few, if any, Australian films as confronting as Ana Kokkinos’s The Book of Revelation, adapted from British author Rupert Thomson’s novel (1999). Daniel (Tom Long), a dancer with a renowned company, leaves the rehearsal room of Melbourne’s Arts Centre to get some cigarettes – and doesn’t return for twelve days. During that time, he is kidnapped by three hooded women who take him to what appears to be a disused warehouse, where they strip him and use him for their own sexual gratification. In our politically correct days, we are now properly informed about men’s exploitation of women; the shock of this film is in turning that around. These women order Daniel to masturbate; they rape him with a silver dildo; they taunt him with the notion of male solipsism in most sexual encounters. When released, he is so traumatised by events that he can barely speak of them, his recollections coming back in enigmatic inserts. He embarks on a search for the three women, but finding them is no more central to the film than is nailing the murderer in Jindabyne: it is about a journey into self, into the sexual self, into the limits of help that others can render. If the film’s thematics are explosive, the shooting style for much of the time is contrastingly spare, chaste, as if Kokkinos wants to concentrate our attention on complex ideas and emotions without stylistic distraction – in itself, a bold stylistic decision. This said, I have rarely seen Melbourne’s streets look so minatory.

Confronting’ is again the word for 2:37, the title of which refers to the time at which a suicide is detected in the toilet of a well-appointed, middle-class school. Blood seeps under the locked door as a teacher sends for the janitor to open it. Again, the film’s narrative procedures are far from conventional. Not only does it flip back to ‘Earlier that day’, as a caption tells us, but, even from then on, the narrative movement is anything but linear. Each of the main characters, all students, is introduced in preparation for the day’s school; then each is arbitrarily presented in a black-and-white insert. In the latter, they in turn address the camera, and thus the audience, offering truthful insights into how they perceive their lives, alerting us to gaps that will appear between their characteristic behaviour at school and their inner longings. The film doesn’t require us to accept their views of the way things are, and frequently repeats an episode from another viewpoint. The twenty-year-old director, Murali K. Thalluri, has not sought for his début the comfort of traditional narratives, and the result is a compelling take on that tired and never-very-rewarding genre, the ‘teen movie’. 2:37, insofar as it warrants that descriptor, is a teen movie about real pains and real fears. There are shocking but utterly convincing revelations, made shocking partly by the film’s way of offering us only bits of the truth at any given time, then forcing us to reassess what we have seen. In stylistic terms, as in formal ones, it adopts rigorously alienating methods; the corridors of this school are eerily empty and blurred; the verdant leafiness of the trees to which the film cuts at intervals don’t offer reassurance, but rather offset those aspects of life that are less predictable, less seasonally tied, than the leaves of the trees.

Ambition doesn’t necessarily entail solemnity or even the overriding seriousness of purpose that characterises these five films. Clayton Jacobson’s Kenny adopts the mockumentary mode to make us – I almost said ‘privy’ – to the life of a man who delivers and installs portaloos on festive occasions like the Melbourne Cup. This kind of humour would once have been broadened to suit the demands of, say, Alvin Purple-type comedy; here, it is used to illuminate a life that finds dignity as well as laughs in its daily round. It is boldly funny and touching, and devoid of smut. The control of tone is masterly and it would take very thin, compressed lips not to respond to the shrewd mixture of satirical style and affectionate observations.

My aim has not been to deliver six mini-reviews but to draw attention to the enterprising ways in which contemporary Australian filmmakers have sought out new approaches to their craft and to the world that provides them with their material. I have not had space to invoke the tender rigours of Candy or The Caterpillar Wish, but the six I have briefly focused on do suggest a heartening willingness to go beyond the conventional. None of them sets out to comfort the viewer; they are all shocking in their individual ways and at various points. But they attest to a level of aspiration that would scarcely have been possible in the recent past.