ImagineNATIVE Festival: Catching Up With an Historic Indigenous Film Wave

This year’s 22nd ImagineNATIVE and Media Arts Festival (Oct. 19-24) takes place amid a traumatic and transformative period that started last May with the uncovering of the grave site of Indigenous children near a Kamloops residential school. 

There have since been more uncovered sites, calls for name changes and removals of monuments commemorating the architects of anti-Indigenous policies, new provincial and federal funding for National Truth and Reconciliation and the establishment of a National Day of Truth and Reconciliation to mark the legacy of the residential school system.

At the same time, this has been a remarkable period for Canadian Indigenous filmmakers, culminating with high-profile films at the Toronto International Film Festival including female-directed Beans, Ste. Anne, Night Raiders, and  Kimmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy. 

Sammy Stump and William Lalua in Portraits From A Fire

All of these are part of this year’s ImagineNATIVE festival as well, which makes ImagineNATIVE a great chance to catch up on this historic Canadian film wave

Finally, “the world’s largest presenter of Indigenous screen content” provides a rare global perspective on Indigenous issues, with 145 multi-media and film works from 51 Indigenous nations. 

There are an estimated 370-500-million Indigenous people around the world, inhabitants of traditional lands who are at risk of exploitation, forced assimilation, social marginalization and genocide. Though these films are drawn from around the planet, they resonate with each other in themes of historical wounds, kinship, memory, and spiritual and imaginative resistance

For a complete schedule of events and film and box office information, go to https://festival.imaginenative.org

 Here are a few of the highlights, selected by the Original-Cin team.

Tues, Oct. 19

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Night Raiders (In Person, Toronto TIFF Bell Lightbox)

Director Danis Goulet's award-winning short films have made her into something of a festival fixture. Night Raiders is Goulet's feature debut, the kind that challenges any idea you might have of how a debut feature film should look. Goulet sets Night Raiders in the future to better tell a story about the past. Goulet repositions one of the darkest blemishes on Canadian history as a science-fiction thriller.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers stars as a Cree mother who, in her efforts to protect her daughter, delivers her into the hands of a state-imposed education camp.

 In drawing similes between the then and the now, Goulet—who is of Cree-Metis descent—juxtaposes history with prophecy. Using conventional science-fiction tropes—the collapse of society, a military state, dystopia, and unidentified flying orbs—Goulet creates a sound case for films of social relevance to be equally entertaining.  The film also stars Amanda Plummer. (Thom Ernst)

Wednesday: Oct. 20

Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart) and 'Headmistress” (Suzanne Cyr) in 'Night Raiders

Portraits From A Fire (On Demand, in select theatres Nov. 1 and VOD Nov. 8)

Full of pixilated flashbacks and flashes of supernaturalism, Trevor Mack’s movie about life and secrets on a B.C. reserve seen through a teen’s eyes and camera lens is equal parts charming, dark and tragic. Tyler (newcomer William Magnus Lulua) is a motherless kid whose gruff father seems to want to avoid him. But, camera-in-hand, he continues pumping out DIY sci-fi films with literal cardboard characters and Sundance dreams. His dreams could be a metaphor for the lure of white culture, addressed by the sudden appearance of the mysterious Aaron (Asivak Koostachin), a young man who convinces Tyler that he should stop with the fake sci-fi and start recording his real surroundings. But Tyler discovers that reality makes some people profoundly uncomfortable. Some solid performances here, but the real scene stealer is Sammy Stump as a res elder and Tyler’s wry surrogate parent, who wants him to make a Western, “so I can shoot white people.”  (Jim Slotek)

Ste. Anne (Oct. 20, In Person, 7 p.m., Scotiabank Theatre, Winnipeg; In Person, 7 p.m., Cinéma Cineplex Forum, Montreal). Oct. 21, On Demand. 

The winner of the Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Film at this year’s TIFF, Ste. Anne is Manitoba filmmaker and artist Rhayne Vermette’s haunting unclassifiable collage of experimental abstraction, allegorical drama and supernatural thriller. It follows a young Metis mother, Renée (played by the filmmaker) who returns to her home town and her eight-year-old daughter, Athene, after having mysteriously disappeared four years before. In the meantime, Athene has been cared for by Renée’s brother and his wife. Warm scenes of extended family reunion gradually progress into tensions about who will be Athene’s guardian. Renée will not talk about the missing years but she has acquired a plot of land in the titular town that bears the film’s name. There she is determined to build a home for her and her daughter, in a defiant confrontation with the malevolent spirit, which has touched their lives.  (Liam Lacey)

Thurs. Oct 21

Kimmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy. On Demand.

The actress and filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers makes a sad return to her childhood home, the Kainai First Nation in Albertato record an epidemic of opioid use, particularly fentanyl, which has gutted the population of the largest reserve in the country. Her mother, Dr. Esther Tailfeathers – an M.D. on the frontlines of the human carnage – and other socially minded locals, strive for “harm reduction,” an empathetic approach that doesn’t require total abstinence and recognizes “cold turkey” as one of the least effective approaches to the crisis. The movie abounds with the human faces of the reserve’s drug plague, and shows the compounded difficulty of overcoming hatred and prejudice in nearby Lethbridge. A hard and hard-hitting doc. (Jim Slotek)

Beans (In Person: Drive-in, Ontario Place).

Beans director, Tracey Deer is not bound by the same temperament as her young protagonist  a timid girl on the verge of adulthood. Beans may or may not be (but probably is) a reflection of the director at a young age. And if telling her story is a burden that needs to be lifted, then Deer does so with confidence and humour, and with a willingness to seize the audience in moments of discomfort. 

Beans takes place at the height of the Oka Crisis, a 78-day stand-off between the Mohawk peoples from Kanesatake, Quebec. For those needing a refresher course, the Oka Crisis began as a peaceful stand against corporate development from infringing on Mohawk territory, which would include lengthening a golf course into an Indigenous burial ground. The protest lights a fuse of hatred and racial divide that draws violent opposition from opposing demonstrators, eventually leading to a stand-off between the police and the military.

Deer is a skilled documentary filmmaker able to incorporate actual news footage into the story without abandoning the film's narrative style. However, there is a staginess to recreations involving crowds of extras shouting obscenities and hurling prop rocks at the passing cars. But Deer contrives a convincing enough excursion into Beans reality that these dips in authenticity are easy to shrug off. (Thom Ernst)

Friday, Oct 22

Cousins (On Demand)

Released on Netflix in July to glowing reviews, Cousins is a poetic drama about the lives of three Maori girls from the 1950s to the 1980s, adapted from a 1993 novel by the now 83-year-old Maori writer Patricia Grace. The film interweaves different time periods, in a dreamlike pattern, following the fates of Missy, Makareta and, especially Mata, the cousin who gets lost and is found again. The film is a combination of a casting and editing coup, featuring actresses at three different points in their lives, childhood, young womanhood and late middle-age. Stories following a group of girls through the decades are enduring (Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers). Cousins explores family and history through a specifically Maori perspective. That includes the importance of whakapapa (genealogy), extended family, ancestors and the traumatic removal of children from their families and homelands. The idea of family continuity and ownership of stories is embedded in the film, as Briar Grace Smith, who co-directed, wrote and acts in the film is novelist Patricia Grace’s daughter-in-law. (Liam Lacey)

Sat. Oct. 23

Mo’ui Faingata’a (Brutal Lives) (On Demand)

Originally presented as the first-ever Tongan bilingual web-TV series, conveniently packaged as a one-hour drama, Brutal Lives follows the journey of Soane “The Shark” Valu, a middle-aged former prize-fighter who returns home to South Auckland from the United States to bury his father, and face his sister and three now adult children who he abandoned. As his daughter prepares for her own debut prize fight, Soane becomes aware of a long curse on his family, related to a vengeful figure with a club determined to wreak vengeance against them. Boxing scenes are credible, and the mixture of family tensions, horror and traditional Pacific Island music make this an engaging package. The series is currently seeking funding for a second season.  (Liam Lacey)

Sun. Oct. 24.

Iwianch, El Diablo Venado (Iwanianch, the Deer Devil (On Demand)

Director José Cardoso takes himself and his skeleton crew deep into the Amazon rainforest, in a mixture of first-person documentary and surrealist trip, with distinct echoes of Werner Herzog’s psychic excavations.  During his trip, he learns that the teen-aged cousin of an Indigenous Achuar friend has gone missing. His parents believe he is dead. But a Shaman, in a plant-induced trance, says the young man is alive but in the grip of a devil deer, who has detached him from reality, taking him across the threshold between life and death. The young man is found, initially unable to speak after 17 days in the jungle, though his story, when he eventually tells it, is a remarkable one. Though the narrative, and the belief system behind it are fascinating, Cardoso pushes beyond anthropological detachment by doctoring the images to evoke visions and hallucinations. (Liam Lacey)