“It is the language that everyone recognises and that everyone can speak,” the legendary actor of more than 50 feature films including Breaker Morant, Sunday Too Far Away, Wake in Fright, Walkabout, The Man from Snowy River, and more recently The Great Gatsby and Mystery Road said.

“The screen is where we talk to each other now.

“Every one of you here has a little screen either in your hand or in your pocket or in your purse."

“Children now at high school - instead of writing essays - make little pieces which they present on the screen with apps that are so sophisticated that they are equivalent to the most sophisticated editing only 10 years ago.

“It is the language of our age. It is where we say who we are, it is where we communicate with each other our hopes, our aspirations and our mark on the world.”

He later remarked “lingua franca” means the “speech of freedom.”

Thompson began his feature film career in 1969 with Wake in Fright and Walkabout,  both Australian films with a British director.

Fifty years later, he is president of a film academy which nourishes film production in 70 countries.

He is in Brisbane for the 12th Asia Pacific Screen Awards - a celebration of the best filmmaking in the region.

“What this event represents is not just the growth of an Australian film industry, but the establishment of an Australian film industry,” he said.

“Australia is now a centre for the making of film, for the education of filmmakers and for the celebration of film-making in the Asia-Pacific.”

“That would never have been considered in 1970.

“It has been an extraordinary 50 years.”

One of the best actress nominees is Damla Sonmez who starred in a Turkish film, portraying of a young woman who communicates only through the traditional language of whistling.

It is based on the true story of a group of 10,000 Turkish villagers near the Black Sea, who have struggled to keep their traditional “bird language” in the face of mobile phones.

“It was a language that was invented towards the beginning of the 19th century,” Sonmez said.

The film’s two co-directors bought the rights to the book, Language of the World, two years ago and began production.

“There was just these three sentences about this whistling language, which is spoken in a north-eastern village in Turkey,” she said.

“And they have been using it to communicate between the very steep mountains and the village because there was no technology.

“It is being forgotten these days because of mobile [phone] technology.

“But after the film, the village was protected by UNESCO and they are now protecting the language and they started a school and are starting to teach young people the whistling language.”

Brisbane is now the permanent home of the awards which recognise film work in 70 countries, including Australia.

The region accounts for more than half the world’s film production, Australia Pacific Screen Awards chairman Michael Hawkins said.

Nominees from 46 films from 22 countries are in Brisbane for the awards.

Among the nominees are Australians Sue Milliken, producer of Ladies in Black, for her work as a co-director with Bruce Beresford and documentary filmmakers Paul Williams and Shannon Swan for their film Gurrumul about the Australian indigenous songwriter.

Lord Mayor Graham Quirk welcomed film actors, producers, technicians, writers and directors to Brisbane for the 2018 awards.

“As a city, we see it as our way of respecting our partners in the Asia Pacific region, but also showing our respect for the many cultures that make up the Asia Pacific,” Cr Quirk said.

“It is, for us, a key international event which brings us closer together. It helps celebrate the many storytellers, actors, actresses and cinematographers and others that make film such a wonderful – and often history-changing - art form,” he said.

Distinguished British filmmaker and producer Lord David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire, Local Hero and The Killing Fields) is also in Brisbane for the awards.

The winners will be revealed here tonight.