2016 Native FilmFest
Storytelling in Many Voices: Native Film Now
by Elizabeth Weatherford
In 2016, the art of Indigenous storytelling in film has never been more interesting and diverse. This year, Native FilmFest features films from outstanding directors from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and Venezuela. The range of stories throughout this festival is wide, and it’s worthwhile noting that strong production support by such organizations as Sundance Institute, the Sami Film Centre and Igloolik Isuma Productions are basic to this diversity and quality.
Opening the festival is Mekko by award-winning director Sterlin Harjo who is honored this year with the Richard M. Milanovich Award for Distinguished Contributions to Indigenous Film. In Mekko, he follows the story of a man, compellingly played by Rod Rondeaux, reckoning with the life in the Indian homeless community in Tulsa who finds himself in an encounter with pure evil. It’s the work of a remarkable filmmaker who also knows a lot about Native film, reflected back at us through small details such as a cigarette package labeled “Smoke Signals”—an homage to director Chris Eyre, whose Smoke Signals was the first feature film by a Native director in the United States and which premiered at Sundance Film Festival.
This year, numerous directors confound expectations with humor. Maori co-directors and lead actors Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clements’ What We Do in the Shadows is a deeply funny film, taking on the genre of vampire movies with style and hilarity. Actors in fully realized humorous roles include Wes Studi in Steven Paul Judd’s Ronnie BoDean and Casey Camp-Horinek in Sterlin Harjo’s Goodnight Irene depicting an unforgettable elder in the waiting room of an Indian Health Service facility.
Looking at antiheroes is a great trope in Native films, a foil for the excessive demands for Native characters to embody stoicism and constant dignity. The issue is an interesting one this year, because we finish our festival with an in-depth look at the photographer Edward S. Curtis whose handsome portraits of people in traditional dress were often a conscious re-modeling of contemporaries whom he was photographing. Curtis photos have been instrumental in concretely defining how to imagine Indians. The beauty of the images is undeniable, but it’s also the work of insightful media makers to take it all down a notch, often through humor or irony, as in the delicious Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, invented and portrayed by Canadian artist Kent Monkman (Cree).
Films urgent with the need for their protagonists to take heroic action are also in this year. Mekko and his struggle on the streets of Tulsa and Hongi in The Dead Lands are emblematic of this theme. Hongi is a young Maori in more distant times, being trained as a peace leader, who must overcome huge obstacles to defend his tribe. That the heroes’ encounters include very ancient tribal knowledge of how evil manifests itself adds vibrancy to these gripping stories.
Audiences who come to Native FilmFest strongly demonstrate their empathy for the struggles facing Indigenous peoples and individuals that have been triggered by the facts of history – removal from their lands, extraction of their resources, and settler colonialism and its associated policies to restrict Native spiritual and cultural learning. Film helps us see how modern Native people contend with these elements, as contemporary Native filmmaking uses its own vast repertoire of community situations and stories.
The struggle for securing traditional hunting rights is expressed in an experimental film featuring Inuit singer Tanya Tagaq. Gone with the River, Venezuela’s entry into the Academy Awards, is a feature film telling the sometimes-painful story of the path taken by a young Wayuu woman reared in a traditional way who becomes a national leader.
Issues of identity are expressed beautifully in many selections, and underscore the discrepancy between traditional boundaries and the ones set by outside authorities – for example, the Native Hawaiian traditions which acknowledge and encourage the potential in dropping enforced boundaries on gender as illuminated in the documentary of a young traditional dancer, Kumo Hina (A Place in the Middle).
In this festival are films that convey stories of individuals finding connections, perhaps set aside for a long time, to their culture’s meanings. In Jáaji Approx., a son, filmmaker Sky Hopinka, pays homage to his father and the language he speaks. INC’d and Stoerre Vaerie (Northern Great Mountain) tell different tales, but in each a community member who has resolved not to return finds a meaningful and revealing reunion.
And some of the films reflect the huge personal cost that might be paid for the amount of displacement people in Native communities have experienced. We have included a gripping and beautiful work from Igloolik’s Arnait Video Collective (which produced the feature Before Tomorrow seen here a few years ago).
In Sol we view the life of a young man, the documentary drawing from dynamic film footage of him taken in an Inuit TV series as a boy and as part of a circus/performance troupe as a teen, and explores how his despair eventually wins.
SIDEBAR
In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Agua Caliente Cultural Museum founded in 1991, and with the approval of the Board of Directors, admission to the 2016 festival will be free of charge to the general public – a special thank you for generous support the community has given the Museum over the past quarter century. The cost of providing the complimentary tickets this year has been underwritten by two members of the Board of Directors who requested that their sponsorship gift be used for this purpose.
The free tickets are required for admission to each screening and can be obtained from Camelot Theatres Box Office at 2300 East Baristo Road, Palm Springs, CA 92262 (760.325.6565) starting February 1. Seating is limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Native FilmFest will be held at Camelot Theatres in Palm Springs on Tuesday, March 1 through Saturday, March 5, with Closing Night activities on Sunday, March 6 held at the Annenberg Theater of Palm Springs Art Museum (PSAM). Support of Native FilmFest comes primarily from generous corporate, Tribal government, foundation, and individual sponsors – without whom the festival would not be possible.
