The ten-day free event is a celebration of Aboriginal culture and especially central western desert art, featuring light installations, music, dance, film, talks and workshops.
The festival's theme for 2023 is "Listening with Heart" as Australia approaches the vote on a constitutionally enshrined first nations voice to parliament.
"Hopefully we'll get through the referendum and all the hard work of our mothers and fathers will come to fruition," the festival's director of engagement and culture Paul Ah Chee said at a preview of the event.
The centrepiece of this year's light installations was inspired by the artwork surrounding the 2017 Uluru Statement From the Heart, with python shapes from the statement's design snaking across the landscape in lights.
"Trying to take an artwork like that and put it into lights can be challenging and very costly, but I think we've achieved it," curator Rhoda Roberts told AAP.
Late on Thursday night, the desert sand was lit up with thousands of globes pulsing with colour, while uplights highlighted white gums and spinifex.
Crowds gathered to watch a light show projected on the nearby mountain range, which is 300 million years old, and children danced under the colours of dot painting projections that had been animated to music.
Earlier in the night, the Mutitjulu artists behind the Statement from the Heart artwork, Rene Kulitja, Charmaine Kulitja and Christine Brumby, spoke about the cultural significance of their work.
"These stories are not only in our heads they are also in our hearts and spirit-souls," Rene Kulitja said through an interpreter.
"The young ones, we are teaching them all of these stories and making sure they listen and take it seriously."
The festival follows a spike in crime in Alice Springs, but traditional owners want everyone to know the community has more going on, Roberts said.
"Their big thing was, we're more than that. We are actually about culture ... no one ever sees the pride in that culture," she said.
"Looking across the country in every Aboriginal community, Mparntwe [Alice Springs] is no different to other communities, it's just that it's a hot spot."
Festival organisers worked with more than 45 art centres in the central desert region to select this year's artists.
They also took advice from a cultural reference group made up of elders, a successful model that has since been adopted for other events.
"We bring all the technology and they bring all the knowledge," Roberts said.
The 2023 slate features The Andrew Gurruwiwi Band and Radical Son, talks by Steven Oliver and Richard Frankland as well as Charlie Maher, the first Indigenous Australian man to finish all six major marathons in the world.
The Warlukurlangu Artists, Maruku Arts and the Hermannsburg Potters are part of a program of workshops.
The Parrtijima light festival officially begins on Friday night at Alice Springs Desert Park.
AAP travelled with the assistance of Tourism NT.
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