Join us for a program of short experimental films by contemporary Indigenous producers who use cinema to provide counter-images to settler narratives in visually and conceptually daring ways. Curated by Dr. Ryan Conrath, Salisbury University professor and film programmer, and conceived in connection to Diné artist Will Wilson’s portraits of Native American people on view in the exhibition In Praise of Shadows, the program examines representations of Indigenous people and worldviews in art and film. Following the screening, Conrath and B.L. Strang-Moya, filmmaker and Ocean City Film Festival organizer, will discuss the films and their contributions to contemporary film culture as well as to a rethinking of Native American people’s involvement in cinema more broadly.
Generously supported by Art Bridges
Schedule
- Future Ancestral Technologies: New Myth (Cannupa Hanska Luger [Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota], 2021, 6 min.) and Future Ancestral Technologies: We Live (Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2019, 3 min.): These films are part of a body of work by Hanksa Luger that personifies the effects of societal ills, such as greed and racism, as corporeal monsters. Through depicting the successful slaying of these monsters by the very people they have long oppressed, Luger creates a new mythology—one of agency.
- Mobilize (Caroline Monnet [Anishinaabe, French], 2015, 3.5 min.): Composed entirely of footage of First Nations people from the National Film Board of Canada archives, this film celebrates the intelligence and technical skill necessary to live off the land, with the pace and energy of a music video.
- The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (New Red Order – Adam Khalil [Ojibway], Zack Khalil [Ojibway] & Jackson Polys [Tlingit], 2018, 10 min.): Through the case of the prehistoric Paleo-American “Kennewick Man” man, this film critiques the inhumane practices involved in the study of people and cultures and the creation of ethnographic archives and museum collections.
- Impresiones para una máquina de luz y sonido (Impressions for a Light and Sound Machine, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, 2014, 7 min.): In this powerful film, a woman recounts stories of injustice her people have suffered over found footage from an old Mexican film. As if to bear the brunt of the physical violence to which she refers, as she talks, the celluloid itself is destroyed, stabbed until it disappears.
- Reclamation (TJ Cuthand [Cree, Scot], 2018, 13 min.): Cuthand explores a dystopian future in which the last Indigenous people on Earth attempt to salvage the planet destroyed by White people who escape to Mars.