May. 29, 2007 - Issue #606: Cultural Capital?
Dreamspeakers Film Fest delights in the art of storytelling
Waban-aki: People from Where the Sun Rises begins with an eye for the nostalgic, bringing its audience into the first half of the 20th century, where the Abanaki of Odanak in Québec made their way through life as basket weavers.
In her most personal film to date, renowned filmmaker Alanis Obosawin (Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, Is the Crown at War With Us?) turns the camera to her own people to deliver a film that is rich with storytelling—meandering bucolicly from finding first love to the smell of the sweetgrass that the Abanaki use to make the baskets that they would sell throughout the area—both in the US and in Canada.
That isn’t to say that Obosawin avoids the politics that inform most of her 35-year canon, however. On the contrary. Like the basket-makers in the film, she masterfully weaves together the different materials to show how the Abanaki and other First Nations are being excised from Canada’s future.
In the film—playing Jun 5 at the Metro Cinema as a part of the 12th Annual Dreamspeakers Film Festival—Obosawin explores the issue of status, and how the whole status system was set up to assimilate Aboriginal culture, to make it invisible. She deftly fills Waban-aki with the past to unearth a possible future, to bring to light injustices that need to be rectified if Canada as a nation is to move forward.
And some of the inequities not only seem stupifyingly simple to solve, but they also seem like inalienable rights that we should all enjoy: a father, for instance, can’t leave his property to his son because his son, through the tangle of the Indian Act, can’t claim Aboriginal status, and therefore a lot on reserve land.
Even though Obosawin takes her audience into the past, she never resorts to trying to make the mirage of a simpler times a reality. Rather, through her interviewees, she acknowledges that things were never really easy—but the paternalistic hand of the government hasn’t made things any easier, either.
What makes Waban-aki a joy to watch is Obosawin’s complete acceptance of the people she interviews. Granted, she knows many of them quite well, but this allows for a special kind of insider status—these are our aunties and uncles, too. Nova Scotian filmmaker John Houston takes a different approach to storytelling in his film Kiviuq—screening Wed, Jun 6 at 7 pm at the Metro. In it, he merges theatrical and filmic aesthetics to tell the epic stories of the eternal Inuit wanderer.
The stories of Kiviuq vary through the different regions of traditional Inuit territory—from Alaska to Greenland. His goal in making the film was an attempt to preserve the different myths about Kiviuq, and in turn the myths about the creation of things like sea ice and fog. Using a handful of actors and a couple of elders on a sparse set, Houston stages seven different stories from the oral history of Kiviuq—a secret bible.
Houston sticks to his guns with Kiviuq, keeps to the stories themselves and avoids allowing any overtly political themes to seep through.
The festival’s opening film The Waimate Conspiracy—Mon, Jun 4 at 7 pm at the Metro—is a bit of a perplexing choice, as enjoyable as it is. In this New Zealand mockumentary by Stefan Lewis, we’re offered a light-hearted look at the issue of land claims.
The Maori of the town of Waimate are struggling to settle a 139-year-old land claim. When they discover a cannonball that seems to corroborate the stories passed down from the elders, George Kepa (Jim Moriarty) and his cohorts are propelled to make this run in the courts successful—at any cost.
While The Waimate Conspiracy suffers a bit from looking too staged—even for a mockumentary—Lewis takes an emotionally charged subject and fills it with humour. George Kepa is no doubt a rabble-rouser, but Moriarty infuses him with such likeable gumption that it is impossible not to succumb to his charm.
What rings through in each of the films is the importance of keeping stories alive. V
Jun 4 - 9
Dreamspeakers Film Festival
Various films & locations
dreamspeakers.org
New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.