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Weekly Updates2009 Native American Film and Video Festival
Smithsonian/National Museum of the American Indian
New York City
March 26-29, 2009
In celebrating its thirtieth year, the Native Film and Video Festival at the National Museum of the American Indian serves as a barometer for the state of indigenous filmmaking in the United States and around the world. Drawn from ten countries, the fourteen features and forty-three shorts on exhibition during this year's four-day festival include short and long fiction works, documentaries, and animations, depicting a multitude of themes ranging from ongoing struggles for native rights, to a celebration of native culture, language, and traditional ways.
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Some of the festival's most pressing issue-driven filmmaking came from south of the border. In a heartening display of indigenous resistance to the exploitation of their land, the Mexican documentary A Cielo Abierto/Under the Open Sky (2007, by Jose Luis Matias [Nahua] and Carlos Perez Rojas [Mixe]) depicts a three-month community protest against the activities of the transnational corporation Goldcorp Mining. The film climaxes with a series of outdoor exchanges between community members and the director of the mining company, with the company's director eventually conceding to the community's demands. Less uplifting, but no less important in its subject matter is Migrar o Morir/Paying the Price: Migrant Workers in the Toxic Fields of Sinaloa (2008) by Alex Halkin of the Chiapas Media Project. This documentary depicts the annual migration of indigenous workers from their homes in the mountains of impoverished Guerrero, to an agri-business farm in northern Mexico where they labor in poverty to supply cheap food for export to the U.S. and Canada. These, along with the festival's other similarly themed films, depict skirmishes in the ongoing global battle between profit-hungry transnational corporations and the world's poor--a battle that often places indigenous peoples on the frontlines.
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A common theme among the festival's program of films was the preservation of indigenous culture. Interviewees in the Alaskan documentary History of the Inupiat: Nipaa I!itqusipta/The Voice of Our Spirit (2008, by Rachel Naninaaq Edwardson [Inupiaq]) describe the harm done by government schools that pressured native students to abandon their language and culture. Although conventional in its reliance on interview-derived verbal testimony, this documentary illustrates the ability of documentary film to elicit a powerful emotional response from viewers. Equally evocative is the work of Canadian First Nation filmmaker Tracey Deer (Mohawk), whose feature documentary Club Native (2008) and darkly humorous short fiction film Escape Hatch (2009) allude to the high cost individuals and communities sometimes have to pay to maintain their native identity. These two films depict, respectively, the rules of blood quantum, which determine who can claim sufficient blood lineage to be considered fully native, and the problems that accompany romance and dating on an Indian Reservation where everyone seems to be related--and where going off reserve for romance brings another set of challenges.
In addition to documentaries and fiction films, the festival included works demonstrating that experimental approaches to filmmaking are alive and well in native film circles. In Melissa Henry's (Navajo) "autobiographical" short film Horse You See (2007), a Navajo horse named Ross describes his equine heritage while poetically alluding to questions of human identity and ancestry. Prominently featured in the festival's daytime screenings were equally creative youth-made videos addressing such varied themes as the experiences of queer native youth (Two Spirited, 2007, by Sharon A. Desjarlais [Cree/Metis/Ojibwe]) and peer pressure (Pow Wow Dreams, 2006, by Princess Lucaj [Gwich'in]).
With films made outside the United States or made by young people prominently featured, noticeably absent within the festival's program were films by mid-career or advanced-career U.S.-based native filmmakers. Of the seven feature films showcased in evening screenings, three were Canadian, two originated in Bolivia, and only two were by U.S.-based directors. Of these, Georgina Lightning's (Cree) Older Than America (2007) is its director's first feature, leaving Chris Eyre's (Cheyenne/Arapaho) We Shall Remain: Trail of Tears (2008) as the only prominent illustration of feature filmmaking on the part of a seasoned U.S.-based native director. Compounding the sense that mature U.S.-based native filmmakers may not be receiving their due, Eyre's Trail of Tears is, despite some elegant cinematography and well-staged dramatic sequences, a stiffly made television-style documentary produced for inclusion in the mini-series We Shall Remain, a part of PBS's "American Experience" series. The paucity of feature films by veteran U.S.-based native directors seems to indicate that these filmmakers are not receiving the career sustaining or innovation-inviting funding and opportunities they deserve and need.
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Viewed collectively, the films programmed at the Native American Film and Video Festival illustrate the diversity and varied creative trajectories of native filmmaking in the world today. The images and stories presented reveal that indigenous peoples have much to celebrate, and much to continue fighting for.
LYELL DAVIES is a documentary filmmaker and community organizer, as well as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Theater Arts at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.
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