“There’s always been a hunger for Indigenous stories that haven’t been given to an audience,” the Australian director Warwick Thornton says.

We’re at the Berlin international film festival where, later that day, the second season of Mystery Road – directed by Thornton and Wayne Blair – will premiere to rapturous applause.

Mystery Road – an outback neo-noir starring the Indigenous actor Aaron Pedersen – is one of eight Australian projects screening at Berlinale this year, two more of which forefront Indigenous Australian stories. One is the feature film High Ground which centres on the bloody massacre of a Yolngu tribe at the end of Australia’s frontier wars, and the other is Tony Briggs’s short film Elders which wordlessly follows a young boy as he searches for his grandparents out in the bush, alone.

“It’s important that different generations of Indigenous people have a voice – for the lineage of storytelling [and to get] different ideas,” says Thornton, a Kaytetye man.

Directed by Stephen Maxwell Johnson (Yolngu Boy), High Ground stars Jack Thompson and Simon Baker alongside Witiyana Marika and Jacob Junior Nayinggul – a screen debut for both actors from Arnhem Land. Since its premiere this week, the film – which plays as a rip-roaring western against the starkly remote Northern Territory outback – has been described as been “relentless” and “unflinching”, words which echo the critical reception of other Australian films to have premiered at international festivals in recent years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There’s always been a hunger for Indigenous stories’: director Warwick Thornton on the set of Mystery Road 2. Photograph: David Dare Parker

Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale, for instance, shocked audiences in 2018 with its graphic, uncompromising look at Tasmania’s dark colonial past, and Thornton’s Sweet Country in 2017 was a scathing reminder of the systemic racial divide underlaying Australia’s history. Both won the special jury prize at the Venice film festival in those consecutive years.

Why are these stories of Australia’s Indigenous injustice resonating so strongly with the international industry? Does it represent a new yearning for work that challenges Australia’s white-washed history?

Maryanne Redpath is the Australian and New Zealand delegate for Berlinale who advises in the selection of films for both countries. She believes the answer comes down to a certain trend among programming that she describes as “collective internationality”: the Australian works making an impact are those that aren’t shying from Australia’s political climate, and its relationship to the world.

We need to address the Australian value of ‘She’ll be alright’ because she’s not alright at the moment. Maryanne Redpath, Australian and NZ delegate for Berlinale

“There’s a lot of unfinished business in Australia and people are starting to wake up. That’s getting reflected in the industry,” she says. “We need to address the Australian value of, ‘She’ll be alright’ because she’s not alright at the moment.”

Notably Redpath singles out Australia’s deplorable legacy of colonisation as a much-needed point of re-evaluation: “We need to address … where we are now, how we looked at ourselves, and how the world looks at us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cate Blanchett and the cast of Stateless on the red carpet at the 2020 Berlinale. Photograph: Christoph Soeder/AP

It’s in that spirit that ABC TV drama Stateless premiered at Berlinale on Wednesday night.

Co-produced by Cate Blanchett, Tony Ayres and Elise McCredie, and inspired by real Australian stories, the show digs deep into the traumas suffered by those detained inside an immigration detention centre in South Australia, interrogating its suffocating effects upon not only the detainees but the guards and bureaucrats bound up in the system.

Julia Fidel, head of the new Berlinale series section which is dedicated to longform television, says she was struck by the show, not just because it shone a light on the Australian government’s abhorrent treatment of vulnerable and marginalised people, but because it offered a valuable non-European perspective to the refugee crisis.

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“Stateless really gives you the full picture of that global impact,” Fidel says. “We all live in a very connected world which you can’t walk away from. It’s going to affect you wherever you are, whoever you are.”

The power of these Australian stories to reach global audiences answers a need for “new voices”, Redpath says, and if their success continues it could open up the door for more boundary-pushing work by diverse storytellers.

Briggs is a Wurundjeri (Woiwurrung) and Yorta Yorta actor who wrote the hit 2012 film the Sapphires. Making his directorial debut at Berlinale this year with Elders, he says new spaces are being opened up for film-makers who have previously been marginalised, including women and people of colour.

“We can understand that together, unified, we can create something incredibly positive and universal,” he says. “We are and can be in control of that narrative.”

• Berlin film festival continues until 1 March. Follow our coverage here.