In the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia, a snake spirit lives in the hidden ceremonial waterhole, or “jila” (living water) as it’s known by the Wangkatjungka people.

Twenty-year-old archival footage featured in a new documentary, Putuparri and the Rainmakers, captures young men digging a tiny wet patch of their remote country, Kurtal. Clean water quickly rises to the surface. It had taken six days of four-wheel driving through sand hills and scrubby bush from the tiny Kimberley town of Fitzroy Crossing to reach the waterhole.

At the sacred ceremonial men’s area the Wangkatjungka men, painted in white ochre and playing clap sticks, have invited the women. Water is thrown on the women to introduce them to the snake spirit. Nyirlpirr “Spider” Snell, a ceremonial leader, dancer and visual artist, builds a storm-cloud sculpture made of mud.

Spider and another elder, Wirrali, both with wispy white beards, dance in the water, holding aloft canoe-shaped, hardwood coolamons – water-carrying vessels – which represent clouds. This is their Kurtal dance. Soon storm clouds move in, thunder booms, lightning crackles and the rain pours.

The ceremony was captured in October 1994 by Snell’s grandson Tom “Putuparri” Lawford, on a “shitty old VHS camera”, as he calls it. The footage became a vital piece of evidence in an 11-year native title claim by the Ngurrara people (which includes the Wangkatjungka people and three other major language groups) that was finally recognised in November 2007.

Included in her documentary, winner of best film at 2015 CinéfestOz festival, film-maker Nicole Ma portrays a community trying hard to hold on to language and culture as it is ravaged by the fallout of substance abuse.

Ma tells Guardian Australia she hopes audiences will begin to understand the many challenges Indigenous people in remote communities have to face every day. “There’s an otherness about Aboriginal people: you only get fed a certain amount of information, and that’s the way people base their thinking.”

The Sydney-born, Melbourne-based film-maker first came into contact with the people of Fitzroy Crossing in 2001 while working on an earlier documentary. Five years later she began interviewing Lawford and when he proved to be an articulate subject he became her documentary’s narrator. Not only does he tell his own story but that of his people, and their long fight to be recognised as traditional owners of their lands.

“I interviewed a lot of young men, and from Tom’s interview, in which he says, ‘I’m a fucking alcoholic,’ I realised he was prepared to put himself on the line. He could speak about both traditional culture and the struggle of speaking in our world. They’re two different universes.”

Lawford, on the phone from Fitzroy Crossing, says he had mixed feelings sitting in the audience at the Melbourne Film festival premiere of Ma’s documentary in August. “I felt happy, but at the same time these other people who don’t know anything about Aboriginal culture, what will they feel watching the movie? How would they react?”

Does he hope the documentary will further their understanding? “White people, they should [understand], but in this country of ours, it’s taking too long. Everything’s going backwards.”

The film takes a unflinching look at Lawford’s battles with alcohol (a substance, he says, that is a problem “for all Aboriginal people, in all walks of life. It will never go away”) and includes lacerating confessions about the violence Lawford inflicted on his first wife.

But ultimately he becomes responsible custodian of his people’s stories, taking boys in his community into country to be “made into men” and works as a cultural adviser at the Kimberley Aboriginal law and culture centre.

In the year that 150 remote Western Australian communities face federal and state funding cuts, with many likely closures, the film is a telling reminder of the strength inherent in 40,000 years of tradition and how such a culture resists the cold indifference of economic rationalism.

Lawford is a firm supporter of constitutional recognition. “Our country was taken from us, stolen from us. We weren’t classed as human beings; we were classed as plants.”

He believes white people see the land in ways that is fundamentally different from Aboriginal people: “They look at the land with greed and money, and owning the land.”

• Putuparri and the Rainmakers is on limited release in Australia. It airs on NITV at 9:30pm on 13 March