In 1974, ethnographic filmmaker Ian Dunlop shot about 13 hours of 16mm footage of the remote Western Desert Pintupi community at their first outstation at Yayayi. He had taken a lot of still photos there a decade earlier and intended to make a follow-up documentary, but his dissatisfaction with the footage and involvement with another project meant he did not pursue it further.

Apart from small segments in the National Museum's 2007 Papunya Painting exhibition, the raw footage remained unseen and in storage for decades until it was digitised and taken back to the Pintupi community on DVDs in 2008.

Remembering Yayayi – directed by ANU Visiting Fellow Pip Deveson, anthropologist Fred Myers and Dunlop – is a documentary about the community's reaction to seeing this footage for the first time. This will be the first time any of it has been seen in Australia outside the Pintupi communities.

Deveson – recently retired from her job as a media research officer at the ANU – says the footage, in colour and with sound, ranged from interviews to chronicling the daily life of the community.

"One of the most significant things about it is that it was at the beginning of the central Australian art movement," she says.

The footage includes artists painting, talking about their work and selling paintings, which has helped many in the community, especially with the establishment of the Purple House Dialysis Unit.

But the need for this unit also reflected one of the more poignant aspects of viewing the footage: many Indigenous people have worse health now than they did four decades ago thanks to the prevalence of soft drinks and other unhealthy foods.

For many people it was an opportunity to see their families and friends again, including people who had since died.

Marlene Nampitjinpa Spencer, a Pintupi woman who is chairwoman of Purple House, was 15 years old when Dunlop came to film.

"I was really scared ... a shy one," she says.

But she and her family are in the footage and she says she was both shocked and happy to see the DVDs.

"I had a great time with my family," she says.

Last year, Spencer was part of the group that went to the United States when the documentary was shown at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York. Spencer spoke at the screening and, Deveson says, let the audience know what the reality of the experience was for the people on screen and made them less like the subject of an anthropological study.

Members of the Pintupi community and the filmmakers will be at the museum screening.

Yayayi is no longer in existence – the former residents now live in small remote towns such as Kintore. But the footage, and now the documentary, will help to ensure it is not forgotten.