Category Archives: Film Festivals

Navajo Film Showcase in NYC this Week

The trailer for Drunktown’s Finest, the opening night film at this week’s Diné Spotlight: A Showcase of Navajo Film, looks really good! The showcase is hosted by the National Museum of the American Indian in collaboration with the NYU’s Center for Media, Culture and History, and all films will be shown at the NMAI Auditorium. There will be an opening reception on Thursday at 5pm and several screenings will be followed by discussions with the filmmakers. Admission is free of charge but RSVPs are recommended (fvc@si.edu or 212-514-3737). Take the 4/5 to Bowling Green, R to Whitehall or 1 to South Ferry to the NMAI located at One Bowling Green near Battery Park.

MAY SUMAK: Quichwa Film Showcase in NYC

May Sumak / Quichwa Film Showcase: Indigenous Media from the Andes and Beyond is coming to New York City this week (March 26-28, 2015). It’s really great to see that the screenings and discussions will be hosted not only in three boroughs (Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens), but also by several institutions: the National Museum of the American Indian, New York University, Lehman College of CUNY, and the Queens Museum. Please note that many of the films will be in Kichwa, the Ecuadorean dialect of Quechua, with English subtitles.

2012 Native Cinema Showcase in Santa Fe

Hello my southwestern friends and folks who will be in Santa Fe through this Sunday, August 19. Please check out the Native Cinema Showcase at the New Mexico History Museum (113 Lincoln Avenue, Santa Fe, NM) ! I checked out a few films for a chapter I recently submitted on films about Native Americans in sports (Skateboard Nation and Run to the East), but many films in the line up are new to me so please let me know what you thought of them. I’m particularly interested in the sneak preview of The Medicine Game. (I still need to post my impressions of Crooked Arrows, which I watched on opening weekend.) Until next time, for all the runners out there, here is the trailer for Run to the East

 

Spotlight on Indian Boarding Schools

For those of you in Vancouver, Washington State University in Vancouver is hosting the 2012 Native American Film Series April 4-6, with guest speakers and a special focus on Indian boarding schools. While I’ve written about Older Than America and The Only Good IndianOur Spirits Don’t Speak English: Indian Boarding School is new to me and I look forward to checking it out and sharing my thoughts in future.

 

 

February & March 2012 Film Festivals

Just a quick note to let you know about two film festivals you may want to check out. The first ever PBS Online Film Festival will include a few films produced by the Native American Publication Telecommunication (NAPT), including I Survived, The Migration, and Horse You See. And, for those of you near Palm Springs, check out the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum’s 2012 Festival of Native Film and Culture which will include Smokin’ Fish. Their website lists the program, but you can also read more about the festival here. Let me know what you think!

Native Eyes Film Showcase in Arizona

I am a little behind on this but I just learned today that the Arizona State Museum and the University of Arizona’s Hanson Film Institute, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, are hosting the Native Eyes Film Showcase November 30–December 4, 2011. Thanks to American Indian Library Association colleague Susan Hanks for the tip!

#NAFVF11 Opening Night

Thursday, March 31st was the opening night of the 2011 Native American Film and Video Festival at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. This was my third time at the Festival and while I have always enjoyed myself in the past, this year, the organizers took it up a notch. So, I’d like to congratulate everyone involved with putting the Festival together. First off, while the Native Networks website remains an invaluable resource, I love this year’s festival website. Second, it was pretty cool that on opening night, the film screened online and the Q&A included questions from around the world via Twitter (the Festival hashtag is #NAFVF11, which I’ve been using to tweet about the festival). Finally, the director of the opening night film, Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, Zacharias Kunuk, skyped in from the Arctic! Oh, and the Festival trailer was a nice touch, too. So, an all around great job of making use of technology to bring these films to the world and back.

And now, on to the show… The opening night film, Qapirangajuq, was directed by Zacharias Zunuk, who also directed the well known film Atanarjuaat/The Fast Runner. This documentary was a huge undertaking involving interviews with 60 elders from 4 communities who speak 5 different Innuit dialects and live in different parts of the Arctic. The elders discussed environmental concerns such as changing wind patterns which make it impossible to accurately predict the weather,* changes in the location of the setting of the sun, and the drastic melting of ice in the Arctic. The documentary presaged the festival’s focus on the environment (Friday, April 1 was largely devoted to films on the environment and ended with a panel discussion called “Protecting our Rivers”).

One of the highlights of the screening came during the Q&A, when an audience member asked co-director Ian Mauro about the correlation which the film made between the positioning of celestial bodies and the environmental crisis. Mauro, who has a doctorate in Environmental Studies, gave a great explanation, but in my effort to jot it down, I only caught interesting pieces. Elders from all over were commenting about the shift in the earth’s axis but Mauro could find nothing about it in the scholarly literature. However, scientists did stand up and take notice when Mauro described a process that is known to them as “refraction.” Due to the collision of hot and cold air in the Arctic, the sun creates an optical illusion which makes it appear at times of the year when it would not normally appear. Mauro noted that this oscillation process is the same that can sort of help you tell the future: if a walrus is oscillating in the horizon, it is a few hours away. Qapirangajuq is the Inuktitut word that comes closest to the English word “refraction” (I believe Mauro translated the word into English as “a pencil that looks bent in the water”). Hearing all this was a highlight to me because it was an instance of native people observing what scientists had not. (In that Russell Means video I referenced earlier, he also noted that scientists still had not come to understand that hair carries memory.)

One of the eloquent voices in the film was Innuit leader named Mary Simon. One of her simple yet powerful statements was that many who debate the environmental crisis focus on national boundaries, which is misguided because the environmental crisis affects us all, regardless of boundaries. Finding cross-cultural common ground in order to help solve the environmental crisis was a theme during the conference and highlighted in movies like River of Renewal. While refraction was a complicated idea to relay, it was surprisingly simple, yet disturbing, to understand how toxins, like yellow acid rain, precipitate, travel north to the Arctic and get locked there. In the film, interviewees noted that people in the Arctic are especially vulnerable since they will be the first to be affected from fish who have high levels of mercury. It was really striking to see our interconnectedness.

Besides showing us the importance of our interconnected actions vis-a-vis the environment, the film is more pointedly critical of Westerners’ roles in Innuit communities. Mauro chuckles while he acknowledges that his Inuktitut nickname is “the thief,” a name he says serves as a reminder of his position in the Innuit culture, where researchers are often seen as more interested in their research than in the local culture. One interviewee prompted laughter as he wonders where all the scientists who claim that the polar bears are in danger of decline are, since he sees no evidence of their disappearing. Another argues that it is actually outsiders, with their noisy helicopters and the collars that are placed on the bears, who are really harming these animals.

This is one of those movies that everyone should watch but in terms of scholarly interest, those teaching about the environment and Innuit culture will want to check this documentary out. In addition, I would recommend it as a way to sensitize science students and scholars doing scientific work in native or other communities to the concerns of the communities where they are studying or working and, ultimately, the big one we’re all inhabiting: the earth.
* This reminded me of a video I recently watched where Russell Means laments the fact that historically, the Lakota had 52 different words for cloud formations. Can you imagine? Not only that there were 52, but that so many could have been lost.