But we barely glimpse what their lives are like when they're not performing and rehearsing, leaving questions that another film might have tackled as subjects of speculation: whether they're all fully committed Christians, for instance, and whether their faith ever puts them at odds with others in their communities, particularly men.

The second half of The Song Keepers sees a number of the women tell their personal stories direct to camera. Stylistically, these are some of the worst sequences in the film, overlaid with cloying music and kitschy inserts (images of fire and water, or eyes gazing raptly upward).

But the content is noteworthy: all these stories testify to the virtue of the local Lutheran missionaries, who are credited more than once with rescuing Indigenous infants who would have been abandoned or killed.

There’s no reason to doubt this testimony, and the subjects of The Song Keepers have every right to have their voices heard. Still, the feel-good simplicity of the film masks broader intentions that might well be viewed with suspicion, in effect proposing a counter to less positive stories and implicitly reassuring its audience that colonisation wasn't all bad.