Native women, committed filmmakers

March 12, 2007

Monday, March 12th, 2007
8 pm, INIS
301, boulevard de Maisonneuve Est, Montréal (Berri-UQAM metro)
Suggested contribution: $7, students $4, (2$ for INIS students)

Discussion and screening with First Nations filmmakers Alanis Obomsawin and Tracey Deer

Moderator: Claire Buffet

Docu-Mondays are back with a promising evening on Native identity. For internationally renowned pioneer Alanis Obomsawin, who has been filming in First Nations communities for 40 years, as well as for Tracey Deer, a young Mohawk filmmaker, documentrary has proven to be a tool to observe, question and denounce. Their committed films offer an inside view of Native heritage and of the conflicts that frequently colour their communities’ relationships with their dominating neighbors.

Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin began her career in the 1960s at the NFB, where she still works. From her first film, Christmas at Moose Factory, on children in a Northern Ontario Cree village, through Kanehsatake — 270 Years of Resistance, a world-acclaimed documentary on the Oka crisis, Obomsawim has never relented in her desire to make films with a social conscience, at once militant journeys and personal explorations. She was admitted into the Order of Canada in 1983 and appointed Officer in 2001. She also received the Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award in Film in 2001. Alanis Obomsawin’s social diplomacy goes beyond cinema. She gives her time, either as a Board or a committee member, to a variety of Native organizations, including Aboriginal Voices and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network.

Tracey Deer is from the Kahnawake reserve and completed studies in Film at Dartmouth College before co-directing her first feature, One More River:The Deal That Split the Cree, which received the award for Best Documentary at the 23rd Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois. Her second feature, Mohawk Girls, presented at the RIDM in 2005, features three young Natives from Kahnawake, questioning themselves on leaving the reserve for the city. Tracey Deer is now working on a third feature on modern Native identity and membership.

Docu-Mondays offer a platform for discussion on the role of documentary film and social commitment. Docu-Mondays, an initiative of filmmaker Magnus Isacsson, are presented by the RIDM, in partnership with INIS.