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Film industry veterans are hailing 2018 as an outstanding year for Northern Territory cinema, underlined by its success at this week's Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) awards.
Sweet Country, shot around Alice Springs by local director Warwick Thornton, cleaned up at the nation's film industry awards, taking out six honours including best film.
Read more about the awards and the full list of winners here.
The top prizes for television and documentary film also went to projects closely tied to the Territory.
The ABC's Mystery Road (best TV drama) was directed by Arrernte filmmaker Rachel Perkins, who trained at CAAMA in Alice Springs, while Paul Damien Williams' Gurrumul (best documentary) was partly filmed on Elcho Island and follows the late singer's rise to fame.
So how is it that a territory with just one per cent of Australia's population is driving major wins in the domestic film industry?
It's been a renaissance year: leading producers
Also this year, Naina Sen's documentary The Song Keepers, set in central Australia, was a finalist for a Walkley Award.
Miranda Tapsell and Wayne Blair's upcoming film Top End Wedding, partly filmed around Darwin and Jabiru, will have its world premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
Sweet Country won the Special Jury Prize at last year's Venice Film Festival, meaning Territorians won awards at the festival for consecutive years — Galiwin'ku's Baykali Ganambarr was handed an acting prize in September.
Sally Ingleton, an independent producer and the former head of funding body Screen Territory, said the industry was experiencing a renaissance, despite the extreme conditions and 16-hour days it often required of filmmakers.
"It's really been formed a few years back, but it's all coming to fruition over the last 12 months, particularly with Sweet Country," she told ABC Radio Darwin's Adam Steer.
"It really shines a light on the fact that there are not only amazing stories that are just sitting there waiting to be unearthed and told, but the Northern Territory is full of extraordinary talent."
Another former director of Screen Territory, Penelope McDonald, agreed.
"When I moved to the Territory, taking up the job as head of Screen Territory, people around Australia thought there was no industry in the Northern Territory," Ms McDonald recalled.
"Well that's proved to be absolutely wrong."
Low budgets, lost cameras
Increasingly, young filmmakers are also finding success in the NT despite the significant logistical problems it can present.
Indigenous documentary maker Dylan River, who hails from a pre-eminent filmmaking family, is one of them.
He is the son of Warwick Thornton and Ms McDonald but before deciding to follow in their footsteps he had ambitions to be a professional motorcycle rider.
Finke: There And Back is his debut and it unites these two passions, following contestants in the Finke Desert race as they pursue success in the face of peril.
"It was a logistical nightmare," River said.
"We had 20 GoPros, all of which we lost in the desert somewhere."
The shoot required three helicopters and about 15 camera operators positioned along the 226 kilometres of desert racing track from Alice Springs to Aputula.
"We sent [camera operators] out into the desert just hoping they'd come back with gold, and all of them did.
"I remember seeing them come back covered in dirt, they hadn't had a shower for three days, and just smiling, going, 'you wait until you see what I've got'."
Naina Sen, another young filmmaker who has worked extensively in north-east Arnhem Land, said the 12-week cinema run her debut feature The Song Keepers enjoyed showed there was a strong interest in Northern Territory stories.
The documentary follows the dozens of members of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women's choir as they travel to Germany.
"We had cinemas across the country calling us and our distributor saying, 'We have to tell you that we're playing the film, and whether there's 30 people in the cinema or 100, they're clapping at the end of it'," she said.
Sen said it was the result of four-and-a-half years' determination that often called upon favours and careful preparation before travelling to remote locations.
"For a big chunk of this journey, this film was very much independent filmmaking at its most guerilla.
"For the first two-and-a-half years of the project we had no traditional funding."
More filmmakers taking note
Ms McDonald, who has been involved with many major Northern Territory films, said the establishment of an industry body could be credited with spurning production.
Under her 12-year stewardship, Screen Territory helped established grants programs, the NT's Capricornia Film Awards and the Darwin International Film Festival.
"The industry is exponentially increasing in both the quality of what it's doing and the volume and the capacity of the industry to make stories that are of interest to the Northern Territory, to the public, as well as of interest around the world," she said.
Despite the extreme weather and travel costs, she believes more filmmakers are being drawn to the NT as word of its rich Indigenous heritage and unique stories spreads. Her son agreed.
"It's such an isolated place. It's a beautiful place — it's very photogenic," River said.
"And Australians are fascinated by this idea of isolation and wilderness in the bush.
"I think the Territory, strangely, lends itself perfectly to those stories, those epic tales."
Topics: film-movies, film, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-culture, arts-and-entertainment, community-and-society, darwin-0800, alice-springs-0870