Dreamspeakers Festival

Page 10

Review

The Dreamspeakers Festival of Aboriginal arts kicked off on May 31 with the screening of five short films at the Princess Theatre in Edmonton. Ranging from light made-for TV fare to searing polemics, the films illustrated both the strengths of Canada's fledgling Aboriginal film community and the challenges it still has to overcome.

The first film, Beverly Moeser's I'm Not Tonto, was one of the few entirely First Nations-produced features at the festival, and the budgetary limitations were obvious. Shot on video, it runs only four minutes, capturing poet E. Donald Two-Rivers delivering a rant in the persona of a violent, dispossessed junkie, the polar opposite of the "gentle, liquid-eyed Indian" personified by the Lone Ranger's sidekick. Lacking the money and production values of the slicker CBC co-productions, the film is also free of the limitations imposed, and pulls no punches with its blunt, ugly eloquence.

Next up was Maryke Mcewen's A Canoe For The Making, every bit as conventional and acceptable as I'm Not Tonto wasn't. A half-hour CBC show, right down to the commercial breaks, Canoe trots out every tough-love cliche in the books, with grizzled old Gordon Tootoosis luring his granddaughter's abusive, alcoholic husband out to a Northern Ontario Island where they must build a canoe in order to return. Of course, once exposed to the old guy's homely platitudes and the grandeur of nature, the husband reforms his wicked ways and returns to his wife a changed man.

Through the message-returning to traditional ways is the key to healing-has value, the earnest, simplistic nature of the film makes it seem all too easy. The cast do well with what they're given, managing to milk a few moments of humor from the leaden script, and the scenery is beautiful indeed, but if this is the best work that a First Nations/CBC collaboration can produce, Aboriginal filmmakers are probably better off on their own. Anyone who's read a book by Louis Erdrich or Thomas King knows that Native stories don't have to be straight-laced morality tales-why should films be different?

Following this, Sagu Yeyananin, a Yukon documentary on the bi-annual celebrations of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Nations, at least scores points for honesty. What it isn't is a movie-it's a moderately successful TV news program produced for Northern Broadcasting. There's footage of some great dancing and singing, along with interviews that describe how the celebrations were outlawed by the government earlier in the century, and had to be held in secret. Unfortunately, the points raised get repetitive very quickly, and there's not much drama to the story being told-the laws prohibiting Native celebrations were gradually let slip, then ignored altogether. Still, it looks like the folk at the celebration were having a great time, and this might serve to lure a few more people up North for the next one.

The Hero, the evening's fourth film, was another half-hour CBC program, though thankfully a little less cliched than A Canoe For The Making. The protagonists here, for once, urban Natives, childhood friends from the Six Nations Reserve come to the big city as roommates. Charlie gets a low-level job in a corporate photocopying room, while Frank becomes an activist thrusting leaflets at passersby. Frank sees Charlie as a sell-out, while Charlie thinks Frank's just a jobless, sponging lower. Then Charlie starts hearing voices in the photocopier at work, and things get very strange. The cast do a great job, and the first half of this has some low-key humor. It gets a bit out of control towards the end, with a blast of hackneyed Hollywood-style Native mysticism (turns out the photocopier was possessed by the ghost of an old -time Clan mother) and some low-brow hijinks as our protagonists blunder through a museum in search of an ancient artifact. But on the whole, The Hero proves that filmic Natives don't have to be stereotypical wise old men or alcoholic bac-woods-dwellers to be interesting.

Unfortunately, the final film was Whose Child Is This?, and from the moment Knowlton Nash's grandfatherly visage appears, it's quite clear that this is just an episode of a CBC 60 Minutes knock-off, Witness, in which Aboriginal peoples are only the subject, and not creatively involved in any fashion. Concerning itself with Aboriginal children adopted and raised in another culture, and their subsequent identity crises as adults, the show does touch on an important issue.

Unfortunately, the most dramatic and awful aspect of this-the period a century or two ago when Native children were forcibly removed from their homes and "assimilated" into white cultures-gets short shrift, with most time being spent with modern Natives who were voluntarily put up for adoption, and whose problems, by comparison, seem less impressive.

The whole thing is made even more unwatchable by the addition of tabloid-TV style "re-enactments" that obscure the real issues and give everything a cheap, tacky feel.

The festival makes it obvious that there's a pool of talented Aboriginal actors here in Canada, but it's also clear that there are few decent vehicles for them.

All of the "films" presented were actually TV productions, with all the limits and drawbacks that imposes on artistic freedom.

While co-production with CBC seems to be the easiest way to get access to professionally-quality crews and equipment, the CBC mandate-earnest, bland, and boring-inevitably dominates the enterprise.

One suspects that the Aboriginal film community is in dire need of more independent, visionary filmmakers who can overcome the financial barriers to create movies that genuinely reflect First Nations interests and ideas. The potential is there. let's hope someone takes advantage of it soon.