It has been 20 years in the making but a film that airs Australia's bloody history about a 1919 massacre of a Yolngu tribe, and its aftermath, has finally reached a global stage.

Veteran Australian actor Jack Thompson walked the Berlin Film Festival’s red carpet with fellow Aussie and Hollywood star Simon Baker and two first-time actors from Arnhem Land, Witiyana Marika and Jacob Junior Nayinggul, at the world premiere of High Ground.

Thompson, the once-grizzled shearer of Sunday Too Far Away, now 79, was brimming with enthusiasm for the film, which showed Indigenous people fighting back. “Because we have suppressed any tale that tells us no, they did not want this, so they can be seen as weak, willing victims. And they weren’t.”

High Ground is directed by Stephen Maxwell Johnson, whose parents were teachers at Indigenous schools in the Northern Territory, has spent most of his life as an NT filmmaker; directing documentaries, music clips and commercials. His only other feature, Yolngu Boy (2001), also starred Thompson and they have maintained a friendship ever since. “I wanted to make High Ground prior to that film but wasn’t able to. People weren’t ready for a story like this. No one wanted to know about massacres; our true history, that kind of stuff. But as the years have gone by, the discussion has started.”