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Indigenous cinema: Tshiuetin, Daughter of a Lost Bird, and more to watch this weekend

Published over 2 years ago • 5 min read

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Worldwide, catch up with two Indigenous film highlights of the year: Portraits from a Fire and Daughter of a Lost Bird. Also catch up with Caroline Monnet's short film Tshieutin streaming worldwide on YouTube. In Canada, catch up with Indigenous sci-fi film Night Raiders.

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Free Short Film of the Week

A showcase of six short films by Anishnaabe/French filmmaker Caroline Monnet from so-called Canada are now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Her first feature, Bootlegger, is in Quebec cinemas at the moment, but we were big fans and will keep you posted on future VOD/international roll out. One of these films, Tshiuetin, is also streaming free worldwide on YouTube.

Tshiuetin - free on YouTube worldwide

In the meantime, her shorts are a great place to start with her work, and I especially recommend the film Tshiueten, which was one of my favourite shorts to screen at TIFF 2016.

Canadian Short Cuts, Tshiuetin, TIFF 2016 Canadian shorts

Here's my review:

Shot in black and white, Caroline Monnet’s Tshiuetin takes us on the 12-hour train journey from Sept-ïles to Schefferville in Northern Quebec. The railway is owned by a group of First Nations, the first of its kind in Canadian history, and it connects remote First Nations communities to Southern Quebec where they go to buy groceries and other supplies. It’s a snapshot into a lesser known part of recent Canadian history, and the snowy sights along the journey are breathtaking.

Click here to watch on YouTube worldwide

Films screening at virtual film festivals

Night Raiders - until Nov 8 - across Canada -PWYC

This Indigenous sci-fi film is a smart allegory for exploring the trauma of residential "schools" in so-called Canada, especially the toll they took on parents. It also stars actress-writer-director and Seventh Row favourite Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, who appeared on our Lockdown Film School last year.

Here's an excerpt from the intro to my interview with writer-director Danis Goulet:

The logline for Cree filmmaker Danis Goulet’s sci-fi feature debut, Night Raiders, sounds eerily familiar: “In a post-apocalyptic future, children are considered state property. Separated from their parents, they are trained in boarding schools to fight for the regime.” Is it sci-fi or the history of how Canada has treated Indigenous People? To paraphrase Mi’kmaw filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, the apocalypse already happened for Indigenous People.
While Barnaby’s genre-crossing Rhymes for Young Ghouls looked at the horrors of residential schools — the schools that Indigenous children in Canada were sent to after being torn from their parents — from the perspective of a teenager determined to avoid going to one, Goulet uses sci-fi to look at this from the perspective of a mother forced to give up her child. In Night Raiders, Goulet crafts a poverty-stricken world of the near-future where surveillance drones are everywhere, a militaristic police force is under constant patrol, and nowhere is safe. Here, all children — not just Indigenous children — are permanently separated from their parents and sent to “academies,” that look like prisons, for schooling that seems synonymous with military training. That also means that the multicultural, multi-racial ‘student’ body looks like the film’s audience, which makes the school pledge, “One nation, one language,” particularly creepy. Ironically, the absolutely horrifying “academies” still seem almost paradisal compared to Canada’s residential schools.

Read the interview.

Click here for tickets.

Daughter of a Lost Bird - worldwide - until Nov 10

One of our favourite films from HotDocs is now screening worldwide this weekend.

A still of Kendra against the backdrop of nature, looking to the right of frame, in Daughter of a Lost Bird.

Here's an excerpt from Orla's review:

Daughter of a Lost Bird opens on Kendra, a young woman in her thirties, sitting on her floor as she nervously makes an important phone call. She leaves a message: “Hi April, this is Kendra Potter, your birth daughter.” Shortly after, April calls back, and mother and daughter hear each other’s voices for the first time.Documentarian Brooke Swaney tracks Kendra’s journey over several years as Kendra reconnects with her long-lost family and her indigeneity. Swaney is careful to contextualise Kendra’s identity crisis within the traumatic history of adoption in Indigenous communities in the US. As a result of the Indian Child Welfare Act, both Kendra and her mother were adopted out of their birth families, separating them from their Indigenous communities by two generations.
Kendra goes through a huge and emotional journey in the film, from the excitement of meeting her birth mother, to the mixed feelings of meeting the Lummi community to whom she belongs, to her growing anger about how colonial violence has shaped her life. Kendra grew up with white adoptive parents whom she loves, she’s white passing, and she has a happy life in the city with her husband and young daughter. She’s torn about whether she wants to embrace her community, in case it means giving up the identity she’s so comfortable in. At the same time, we watch her come to terms with the fact that she’s a textbook example of assimilation, which causes her a lot of hurt and rage.

Read the full review.

Click here for tickets worldwide until Nov 10.

American Indian Film Festival - Nov 5-13 - worldwide

Portraits from a Fire - worldwide until Nov 13

This Indigenous film from so-called Canada is bursting with visual ideas and well worth checking out despite some flaws. It'll be out on VOD in Canada next week, but AFAIK has no plans for international distribution so this could be on of the only chances to see it.

Tsilhqot'in filmmaker Trevor Mack's feature debut, Portraits from a Fire, is a hugely ambitious film about family trauma, coming of age, and memory. The film follows sixteen-year-old Tyler (William Magnus Lulua) who dreams of becoming a filmmaker, and makes his own movies by himself using an old camcorder he found in his house. Tyler is mostly left to his own devices; his mother is no longer around, and his father is largely absent for work. When Tyler discovers footage of his parents when they were young, it sparks questions about the lies of omission about what happened to his mother.

There's a dreamy quality to the film, which uses digital glitches in thoughtful ways to look at the link between video footage and memory. It's also enormously funny and entertaining at times, hugely steeped in place and culture, and also heartbreaking. It doesn't always work, with some particularly poor dialogue, at times, but the performances are uniformly great. The film's many thoughtful visual ideas make Trevor Mack a major talent to watch behind the camera.

Click here for tickets.


Happy watching!

Best,

Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief

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Seventh Row is a nonprofit Canadian film criticism publication and publishing house. We're dedicated to helping you expand your horizons by curating the best socially progressive films from around the world and helping you think deeply about them. This newsletter is run by Seventh Row (http://seventh-row.com) but features exclusive content not found on the website.

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