ALASKA DAILY | WAKANDA FOREVER

Watching: ABC’s Alaska Daily

Alaska Daily is a new drama series (on ABC and streaming on Hulu) that “tells the story of a real-life phenomenon in the true-crime world. The overarching storyline is the investigation of missing and murdered Indigenous women… In addition to its inclusion of the MMIW crisis, the series examines Alaskan issues with which audiences can identify: local government corruption, the American mental health crisis, environmental degradation, and more. Because the show takes place in Alaska, there are frequent mentions, allusions, and inclusions to the many Indigenous communities that populate the area, thus making it the prime setting for exposing the violence against Indigenous people.” “Meet the Alaska Native creatives in the writers room for ‘Alaska Daily’” by Rhonda McBride in KTOO Public Media, October 7, 2022. 

The series stars Grace Dove (Secwepemc), currently starring in the 2022 film Bones of Crows (dir. Marie Clements), and two-time Oscar winner Hillary Swank. The two are assigned to partner-up as investigative reporters at the major Alaska daily paper. It features Irene Bedard, of Iñupiat and Canadian French and Métis heritage and a member of the Alaska Native Village of Koyuk, as the mother of a MMIW victim. In the writers’ room are playwright T’set Kwei Vera Starbard (Tlingit), who has also written for the popular series Molly from Denali, and Andrew Okpeaha McLean(Iñupiat), also a director of award-winning short and feature films including On the Ice. At least one episode is Indigenous-directed, by Danis Goulet (Cree-Métis), who was the winner in 2021 of the Canadian Screen Awards’ Best Emerging Director Award for her futuristic thriller, Night Raiders.

The English 

Produced by BBC and Amazon Prime. Online on Amazon Prime and on BBCOne.

This western drama television series was produced by BBC and Amazon Prime, and premiered in the United Kingdom on Nov. 10 and in the US on Nov. 11. Written and directed by Hugo Blick, and starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer, it was developed with in-depth consultation with Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee). An Englishwoman, Lady Cornelia Locke (Blunt), comes to the West in 1890 looking for revenge on the man she sees as responsible for the death of her son, and meets Eli Whipp (Spencer), ex-cavalry scout and member of the Pawnee Nation by birth, on his way to Nebraska to claim the land he is owed for his service in the US army, despite having been told that the white men will not honor their debt. They discover a possible shared history. See the recent article by Sandra Hale Schulman in ICT for more details.

Wakanda Forever

“Tenoch Huerta Mejía and the Beauty of Representation in Wakanda Forever”by Carlos Aguilar in the New York Times, Nov. 16, 2022. The article focuses on the Mexican actor and antiracism activist, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, who is playing a Mesoamerican godlike character, Namaor, in the sequel to the Marvel movie Black Panther. Huerta, given a distinctively Nahua name by his father, is of Indigenous descent, with a Nahua maternal great-grandmother and a Purépecha paternal great-great-grandfather. He does not self-identify as Indigenous, but uses his platform to encourage people to learn more about their Indigenous heritage within and outside the community. “That Wakanda Forever features Indigenous, brown-skinned characters with supernatural abilities living in a mesmerizing realm allows anyone who connects with Huerta’s principles to finally feel respectfully represented. The film also challenges media companies and artists in Latin America and beyond to rethink their portrayals and inclusion of people of color in their projects.”

FILM SERIES AND FESTIVALS
Online

Indigenous Film & Arts Festival – Monthly Series
A Morning with Aroha

Wed, Dec. 14, 7:00-8:15 pm MT. Online. Free with registration

Presented by the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management, Denver American Indian Commission and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science

A Morning with Aroha Narrative short. Aotearoa/New Zealand. Nicholas Riini (Tūhoe). Young Aroha, with a little bit of magic, brings her imaginary world to life, spreading joy to her friends, family, neighbors, classmates, and all who pass by. A story about the power of family, of art, of celebrating difference, and of aroha (love). Followed by a live Zoom discussion/Q&A with filmmaker Nicholas Riini, moderated by Mervyn Tano, President IIIRM.

Hemispheric Institute at NYU and 
Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage 

Indigenous Cinema Film Series ’22 | “Images to Postpone the End of the World”

Dec. 2-12. Free with registration. Online at HemiTV, a portal on the website and available to all platforms and devices. Registrants receive a link to access each of the film programs.

“Following Ailton Krenak’s invitation to consider the interdependence between all living beings, we look at what nourishes and sustains us: from the primary bond to land and water, to acts of healing and ceremony.” On five consecutive weekends in November and December, NYU’s Hemi Institute and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage of the Smithsonian have been presenting online the annual Indigenous Cinema Film Series, curated by Amalia Córdova, Supervisory Curator, World Cultures and Chair, Cultural Research and Education at the Smithsonian’s Folklife Center.

Each program begins with a well-selected music video and then shows films from diverse Indigenous communities in the Hemisphere. N. B. – Several of these films have been showcased in such festivals as Sundance and imagineNATIVE in 2022 and some of the filmmakers are recent winners of the Divino Tserewahù Awards for Indigenous Film at the 2022 Ethnographic Film Festival of Pará in Brazil.

Week 4: Fri, Dec. 2, 12 noon EST – Mon, Dec. 5, 12 midnight. Free with registration. Online

Trafkintun Chile. Gerardo Quezada. In Mapuzungun w/ Spanish subtitles. Inspired by a traditional Mapuche song of his grandmother, and performed by Mapuche rapper Jaime Cuyanao Venegas.

Ma’s House US. Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock). On the Shinnecock Indian Reservation at Southampton, NY, Ma’s grandson–artist and photographer Jeremy Dennis–is on a quest to restore the family home to its central role as a community gathering place for a new generation of diverse artists.  

Nūhū Yãg Mū Yõg Hãm: Essa Terra É Nossa! / This is Our Land! Feature documentary. Brazil. Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu, Roberto Romero. In Portuguese and Guarani with Portuguese subtitles. “In the past, white people did not exist and we (Maxakali people) lived hunting with your yãmīyxop spirits. But the whites came, cut down the forests, dried up the rivers, and drove the animals away.  Today our long trees are gone, the whites have surrounded us and our land is tiny. But our yãmīyxop are very strong and they teach us the stories and songs of the ancients who walked here.”

Last Week! Week 5: Fri, Dec. 9, 12 noon EST – Mon, Dec. 12, 12 midnight. Free with registration. Online. 

Os espíritos só entendem o posso idioma (The Spirits Only Understand Our Language) Brazil. Cileuza Jemjusi, Robert Tamuxi, and Valdeilson Jolasi. In Portuguese and Manoki with English, Spanish or Portuguese subtitles. Only four elders of the Manoki population in the Brazilian Amazon still speak their Indigenous language, The three directors, young leaders in the Manoki Paredão village, tell the elders’ version of the long and difficult history of relations with non-Indigenous people.

Equilibrio Brazil. Olinda Muniz Wanderley (Tupinambá, Pataxó hãhãhãe). In Portuguese with English and Portuguese subtitles. For the Tupinambá, the stories of Kaaporo, the Indigenous spiritual entity, speak to the reality of the condition of humanity and of the life-giving earth.

Mujeres Espiritu/Spirit Women Chile. Francisco Huichaqueo. In Tzotsil, Mapuzungun, Quechua and Spanish with English subtitles. This film weaves together a collective portrait of five women united by spirituality and poetry. Although they don’t know each other personally, the force of their declamatory speech, unique to each of their territories, brings them together

FESTIVALS and SCREENINGS
In-Person in US

Nationally in 12 Cinemas in US 
Utama

Dec. 1, 2022-Jan. 20, 2023

Utama Bolivia, Uruguay, France. Alejandro Loayza Grisi. Bolivia’s beautiful Oscar submission is about an Indigenous couple in the Bolivian highlands facing the struggles of a drought, and the new perspectives brought by their grandson who comes to them from the city. It is playing in theaters in 12 cities in the US between Dec 1 and Jan 20. Many of these are for limited runs, and all are listed on the website of the film’s distributor, KinoLorber. The film is spoken in Quechua in its entirety, with English subtitles.

11th GALA Film Fest

Nov. 30-Dec. 4. Tickets. In-person in at the GALA Hispanic Theatre in Washington, DC

In the past few years, Central America has become a hotspot for Latin American film. Despite limited support and numerous obstacles, the cinema of the region has been able to flourish creating a strong generation of young filmmakers that are leaving their mark in the international scene. Curated by Carlos Gutierrez, director of Cinema Tropical, this year’s edition is screening films from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama. and Includes a feature from Guatemala with a strong Indigenous storyline.

Sun, Dec. 4, 7 pm

Roza Narrative feature. Guatemala/Mexico. Andrés Rodríguez. In K’iche’ and Spanish with English subtitles. Hector returns to his village in the Guatemalan highlands after a long and difficult migration to the Unites States. He returns home to a possessive mother, a distant wife, a son that doesn’t recognize him, and a community that pushes him out. Hector decides to take back his life by way of force, driving the whole town into near chaos. Winner. Best Mexican Feature at the 2022 Guanajuato Film Festival. Screening followed by Q&A with the director.

Anchorage International Film Festival

Dec. 2-11. Tickets. In Anchorage.

Indigenous-themed films include

Bering, Family Reunion Documentary. US. Lourdes Grobet. Etta, an Iñupiaq Alaskan Native, crosses the Bering Strait looking for the relatives she got separated from during the Cold War. The consequences of this trip highlight the on-going dilemmas that the inhabitants of the area face nowadays.

Big Crow Feature documentary. US. Kris Kaczor. Born in 1974 on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SuAnne had become one of the state’s best basketball players by age 14. By the time of her tragic death she was legendary – everyone you meet on “the Rez” has a story about how SuAnne’s spirit continues to galvanize the Lakota in their fight to reclaim their language and save their culture, embracing what Su called “a better way”.

The Wind & The Reckoning.Narrative feature. US-Hawai’i. David L. Cunningham. 1893. Following the takeover of the Hawaiian Kingdom by the US, all Native Hawaiians suspected of having leprosy were banished to Moloka’i. This film tells the story of a couple, Ko’olau and Pi’ilani, who have become iconic for standing up against the new dominant authorities who tried to force the family’s separation when their young son contracted the disease. Based on real-life historical events as told through the memoirs of Pi”ilani herself.

African Diaspora International Film Festival

Mon, Tues, Dec. 5, 6. Tickets. In-person at Cinema Village in New York City

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On Feature documentary. Canada. Madison Thomas. The life, music and activism of legendary singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree).

FESTIVALS 
In-Person in Guatemala, Chile

Icaro International Film Festival 

Dec. 1-10. Tickets. In Guatemala

Icaro Film Festival was founded in Guatemala in 1998 with a vision of providing a cultural space for the diversity of the many regions of Central America and their film and arts, with particular attention to cultural diversity, human rights and a media environment that promotes unity. Both regional and international productions are selected, and its programming also travels for screening in many other Central American countries. Indigenous-themed films include

La rebelión de las flores Argentina. María Laura Vázquez. In 2019 a group of women of different Indigenous backgrounds occupied peacefully the Ministry of the Interior to protest and to urge a new approach to safeguard peoples and the lands.

Xiw – Miedo Documentary. Guatemala. Ameno Cordova. In Spanish and Maya. The Q’eqchi’ Maya resistance against the extraction industry, and its pollution of the sacred lake and fishing as well as invading the area with criminality, murder and intimidation. This seems to be a continuation of the oppressive violence against the Maya of the 1980s.

Wigudun Feature documentary. Fernando Munoz, Raphael Salazar. From the earlieast accounts of the 15th and 16thcenturies recorded by colonial witness, numbers of Indigenous peoples in the Americas considered there to be more than two genders, and that more diversity was the rule. In Panama, the Kuna people identified a third gender. Omeggio, lead from the time of creation by the “little brother” of the Creators, Wigundun, whose responsibility was to give ritual and celebrations to the community. Today this heritage is being respected, and revived.

17th Arica Festival de Películas Nativas 

Nov. 28-Dec. 11. In Arica, Chile’s northernmost city

This Festival screens both feature length and short films in several categories, such as the category environmental films and the two categories below. A catalog with descriptions of the films is available for viewing on the website.

Rural Feature Films The stories and images of rural worlds, of the cultural landscape of people living life outside of cities.

  • La danza de Los Mirlos Peru. Álvaro Luque 
  • Manco Cápac Peru. Henry Vallejo 
  • Al amparo del cielo Chile. Diego Acosta 
  • El gran movimiento Bolivia, France, Qatar, Switzerland. Kiro Russo

Jallalla Feature Films Works that have been directed, produced and/or written by filmmakers from Indigenous cultures which make visible their own perspective on their history, customs, rights, territories, languages and traditions

  • Pachuka Peru. Tito Catacora 
  • Cruz Mexico. Teresa Camou Guerrero 
  • Cam: liberar una nación Chile. Edgard Wang Saldaña 
  • Eami Paraguay, Argentina. Paz Encina

TALKING ABOUT 

Forge Project
“Gentrification is Colonialism: Housing and Colonizing Architecture”

Sat, Dec. 2, 2 – 5 pm ET. Free. Registration requested. In-person at 2 Main Street, Kingston, New York

Forge Project, a Native-led arts and decolonial education initiative based in Ancram, is hosting a three-part public series of dialogues and intimate conversation sessions, “Gentrification is Colonialism,” between local organizers, community members, and Indigenous activists whose work fights against gentrification, the housing crisis, “sick” architecture, and the ways in which artists and cultural spaces are complicit in their construction.

The second panel in this series focuses on housing justice, a major issue in the US, no more so than in Kingston, NY, where this discussion is taking place. The dialogue will focus on the ways in which architecture itself, including but not limited to “public” or government housing, is a tool of the colonial project in the United States and Canada. In this context, Indigenous architecture, both historical and contemporary, can offer non- and anti-colonial models useful in understanding and extending both organizing and scholarship with regards to government housing.

Panelists:

  • Chris Cornelius (Oneida), architect, studio:indigenous 
  • Alec Martinez, urban planning student at Harvard Graduate School of Design 
  • Moderator: Kwame Holmes, scholar-in-residence in human rights project at Bard College

National Museum of the American Indian
 “Ancestors Know Who We Are” Artist Discussion

Sat, Nov. 3, 2-3 pm ET. Free. Livestream and in-person in Washington, DC. 

Join the artists featured in the NMAI’s online exhibition “Ancestors Know Who We Are” for a discussion about Black-Native identity and its expression through art. Go to the link to access livestream.  Participating artists are 

  • Joelle Joyner (African American and Kauwets’a:ka [Meherrin] descent)
  • Moira Pernambuco (African and Amerindian [Wapishana])
  • Paige Pettibon (Black, Salish, and white descent)
  • Monica Rickert-Bolter (Prairie Band Potawatomi, Black, and German)
  • Storme Webber (Alaskan Sugpiaq [Alutiiq] and Black descent).
  • Moderator: Amber Starks, aka Melanin Mvskoke (Black/Muscogee Creek)
  • Introductions by exhibition curator Anya Montiel (Mexican and Tohono O’odham descent).  

AWARDS AND HONORS

10 Canadians to Watch

This year Variety and the Whistler Film Festival have teamed up to inaugurate “10 Canadians to Watch,” a new program that celebrates top Canadian talent in the film and entertainment industry. Three Indigenous creatives are among those recognized–director and writer Jules Koostachin (Broken Angel), actor Asivak Koostachin (Broken Angel, Red Snow), and Gail Maurice, director and writer, (Rosie) and actor (Night Raiders).

Gotham Awards Nominations

The Gotham Awards, one of the leading honors for independent film and television, provides early acknowledgement to groundbreaking independent films and television series. Indigenous performers and a significant documentary closely following the struggle to protect their lands from invaders by members of the in Brazil were nominated this year

  • Outstanding Performance in a New Series – Zahn McClarnon in Dark Winds 
  • Breakthrough Performer – Kali Reis in Catch the Fair One 
  • Best Documentary Feature – The Territory.

2022 American Indian Film Festival Award Winners

  • Best Feature – Broken Angelby Jules Arita Koostachin
  • Best Director – Jason Brennan for L’inhumain
  • Best Actress – Sera-Lys McArthur in Broken Angel
  • Best Actor – Samuel Tremblay in L’inhumain
  • Best Documentary Feature – Powerlands by Ivey-Camille Manbeads Tso
  • Best Documentary Short – Long Line of Ladies by Revka Zehtabchi, Shaandin Tome
  • Best Live Short – Nxaxaitkw by Asia Youngman
  • Best Animated Short – Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics by Terril Calder
  • Best Music Video – Magic Hits by Justin Stephenson