You fly into Coober Pedy from Adelaide. It's a two-hour flight in a little 16-seater Metro: no in-flight service; no luggage compartments; the pilot does the safety announcement squatting in front of the open cockpit and you buzz along at 16,000 feet, bouncing in thermals rising off the vast salt lakes and the red, pink, orange desert below. You land in a landscape pitted with opal mines dwarfed by an amazing, flat, 360 degree horizon. The sky is a radiant blue dome, and sun at this time of the year is warm and comforting, not the blistering heat I imagine of high summer.

You drive into town, which is only 10 minutes away, and immediately you have a sense of driving into a wild west outpost. Coober Pedy looks like the modern version of those isolated, alone places we're all so used to seeing in movies. It looks like that, because that's exactly what it is. I had the feeling after 24 hours in town that the only thing missing was the Duke - John Wayne, riding high, dishing out that pragmatic and lawless justice the American wild west was notorious for. Stupid I know, but that's the sense of the place. Of course when you hear the stories you start to think maybe it's not that stupid. My favourite is the one when Greece won the world cup: two sticks of dynamite went off in the middle of the night, blowing out about 90 windows in town! The Greeks in town account for 30 per cent of the population. No one was ever caught.

The Town sits on the Sturt Highway between Pott Augusta and Alice Springs. Tourist buses thunder between the two for most of the year, offloading for a day or two loads of Australian and international visitors keen to buy opals and explore the working mines. And there's a constant stream of backpackers and caravans.

On that last trip, it seemed to me that Coober Pedy was inhabited by three distinct groups. The first are the miners, who spend their life below ground. To keep their licences they must mine for a minimum of 20 hours a week for 48 weeks of the year. They live and work below ground and come up for the pub and to shop. I spotted a few driving round town, looking slightly crazy.

Coober Pedy first came into existence in 1916. Then it was just tents and claims. Real construction began after the second world war, and it has grown ever since. They say that most people who come to Coober to mine are running from something, so that life hidden below ground prospecting on the chance of striking it rich suits the loner. These people have been here for years - they are the true residents of the European settlement of Coober Pedy; there are the Greeks who came in the 60s and stayed; there are Slovaks, Croatians, Italians and Serbs , to name just a few. The population is so multicultural that there is a Multicultural Forum in town.

Then there are those who live 'above ground'. They mostly seem to work in health, law and justice, government services, education and service industries. Those who are not 'residents' stay for two or three years, filling contracts, or taking remote appointments to further their careers. They do their job and move on to another hotel, another police station, another school. They become as much a part of the life of this town as they possibly can, but they are always leaving, never staying.

And then there are the local Aboriginal people: the 'blackfellas' who inhabit 'the reserve', and the footpaths of town. On my previous visit I had immediately noticed that 'divide', and it is certainly one the town feels. It looked like this: whichever side of the main street had the most blackfellas sitting on it seemed to be the one least used by the whites. Then I remembered the dry sense of humour I'd seen among many of the Aboriginal people I'd encountered on my visits to Alice Springs and on trips into Brewarina and more recently Wilcannia. True or not, I decided this was a wonderful game played by them, the Indigenous people of town; I imagined them crossing from one side of the street to the other just to watch the whites do the same.

The Drive-in Committee work hard to make sure the local Aboriginals are welcome to the screenings; they are building an outdoor sitting area for them as they always walk in from the reserve and on Saturday there's a great rowdy bunch of kids having a hoot of time tearing round the canteen during intermission.

The driving force behind Big Screen in Coober Pedy is the Drive-In Committee headed by Kevin Woon, Tina Doulgaris and Steve Staines. Tina is the senior nurse at the Coober Pedy base hospital and the head projectionist at the drive-in where we will screen. Tina has lived in Coober for 16 years. She learned to run 16mm film in the army. Her dad was a mechanic so she has always had a fascination with machines. She has taught herself to run the big old Cinemacannicas at the drive-in and divides her time between the hospital and ensuring the town has some cultural life through fortnightly screenings. She also spends as much time training volunteers in projection - no mean feat.

Every day I am in town we organise to meet at the end of her day, but she never seems to be able to get away from work before well into the night. It's usually 8pm when she calls me to apologise for not making it again. More so than most who devote their spare time to community activity, Tina seems to be able to squeeze more into a day than seems possible. On the opening night, when we're meant to screen at 6.30pm, she is held up again at the hospital, but still walks in calmly at 6.10, and has the show up by 6.40pm … which is perfect really because that's just 'Coober Pedy time'.

The Drive-In is situated just on the edge of town. Out here where it's very flat, red and dusty, the screen looks quite surreal, like it has just been plonked in the middle of the desert. It's amazing to be running in this location.

Before we screen there though I run Jedda and Storm Boy for the Area school. I think just about every student turned up over the three sessions. To run these sessions I have to set the venue up. I've shipped in a screen, sound system and video projector and 'blacks' and spend most of Wednesday getting everything set up. I also screen The Magic Pudding on Saturday morning, for the kids, and Jedda on Sunday, in the same venue.

On Friday night we open with Hating Alison Ashley and get 20 cars, which is a great turn out for a night of the week usually devoted to the pub, or unwinding at home after the working week. The further out you go, the more isolated you get, the more you realise how the rhythms of towns are almost immutable.

On Saturday night with Sophie Lee in town as special guest we screen three of her films, Mimi, The Castle and Bootmen.

Sophie has brought her two-year-old daughter Edie with her, and she comes along to opening night as well, dressed in her fairy outfit and totting her favourite toy 'monkey boy'. On Saturday morning Edie and Sophie had come up for the Bub's Club screening of The Magic Pudding. This was Edie's first ever film; how very cute, to think that Big Screen showed young Edie Friedman (Lee) her first film all the way out in Coober Pedy.

The weekend continues in a strange way. We never get more than 20 cars to the Drive-In. I am happy with this but the locals aren't. They were expecting more. I have to keep reminding them that this is year one, and we have work to do.

I think it's a little strange for Sophie too. The venue is certainly not your usual festival venue - a drive-in in the middle of the desert - and everyone tends to sit in their cars. When we head down at intermission, between The Castle and Bootmen, so that people can meet Sophie and have a chat, she is competing with the legendary donuts, the not so bad hamburgers and half a dozen local Aboriginal kids haring around the cafeteria like there's no tomorrow. It's slightly strange, but it also goes with the place. So a few people wander in for autographs and to say hello.

This venue is strange for me too; strange in a good way. It's hard to pick how people are feeling, because they're all sitting out there in the dark, locked away in their cars, and soon as the film is finished, they drive off. Those that came to say hello to Sophie were genuinely excited and the kids were obviously having a great time. But to be in such an isolated community, in such a unique venue, running Australian films up on what is probably the biggest screen we will ever run on, and doing it off classic projectors burning carbon for light, is like a trip down memory lane as well as a look into the future of cinema in Coober Pedy.

For me the most important thing is that Big Screen has arrived at the beginning of something for Coober Pedy. The Drive-in committee, Steve, Tina, Kevin and the rest of the mob, are so committed to keeping film coming to town, that their energy is infectious. While Tina surfs the net looking for equipment, Steve madly fills out funding applications, and Kevin programs and organises the volunteer roster. It is wonderful to be associated with such energy, and an energy totally devoted to film and keeping it going, by any means necessary. I am committed to do everything I can to make sure this mad mob realise their dreams. I wish that every funding agency they apply to would make the trip to see the hard, very hard, work that these people put in.

While I'm there I meet another person who lives further out who wants to get films out to the even smaller, more isolated, communities further out in the desert. So that's another plan for next year: in the same way we went out from Broken Hill, we'll head out from Coober Pedy, taking Australian films further and further afield.

We finish up on Sunday with a screening of Jedda in the morning and Buddies in the evening. There's a great turn out for Buddies; it's a film about Sapphire miners, shot around Emerald in central west Queensland, perfect for Coober Pedy, and the audience really get into it. I say my goodbyes at the end of the screening, having already started panning 2006 and whatever we can get going in between. By 6am I am on the road to Ceduna, 1,100 kms away on the Great Australian Bight. I'm going to spend a couple of days on the road scouting new towns, new committees, before heading back into Port Augusta for the next Big Screen. 27-29 May. See you there.

Contact Peter Castaldi at p.castaldi@afc.gov.au