The First Peoples Festival

8th August 2013

It’s high time to talk about Native Peoples in Montreal: fiction, documentary and animation of the international film event.

By Luis Soldevila from Webmetrics Spain.

There is a close link connecting the literature with history, traditions and modernity. This link transforms into powerful images that persist in memory with a loud voice that personifies people who are traditionally more disadvantaged, the first people, the natives. The First Peoples Festival comes precisely from this powerful force and with the primary aim to give visibility to these cultures. It tries to engage everybody with richness and diversity, but also with claim and struggle of aboriginal people through culture, in a broadest sense, with cinema, theatre, music, food, dance, painting, sculpture… This delicate art tool, which is cultural identity – as noted by André Dudemaine, director of the show – connects us with the ancestral and with the possibility of leaving a legacy for the sake of posterity. Within this transcendental contribution we can find over 50 films, which are going to be presented this year at the Festival and which are candidates of major awards.

Canada, United States, Australia, Polynesia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico and even Spain and Germany have a space in this exhibition, which emphasizes documentaries – main identity of the festival, and fiction, a genre that covers half of the amount of production for the first time this year. The productions, which are presented in this edition, transmit the echo of the peaceful protest movement “idle no more” (http://www.idlenomore.ca) that emerged strongly in the month of December and was promoted especially through social networks and mass media: a call to move beyond passivity and invisibility of native people and fight for their culture, their sovereignty and territory. Topics of the focus for most of the tapes that are projected during the Festival, an event that will debut globally two features: the U.S. “Winter in the Blood” (http://winterinthebloodfilm.com) and the Canadian production “Les ailes Johny May” (http://vimeo.com/19290999), and also the documentary “L’Esprit rail Mitchif et dumont”.

The Festival is a compulsory international meeting point when film production competes with the one more related to indigenous peoples. In fact, in the First Peoples’ Festival the main object of the organizers was to celebrate indigenous films and filmmakers. In the years since, the festival now Boasts of the biggest collection of indigenous archival films available for online perusal.

The opening film, “Paroles Amérikoises”, following these lines related to Innu poet Rita Mestokosho and the plight of her people, is transferred to a remote reserve by the federal government. The film is about the Innu poet Rita Mestokosho – www.nativelynx.qc.ca/en/litterature/mestokosho.html- and the poets she has summoned to Ekuanitshit – (“where things run aground “), an Innu community of just over 500 people who were transferred by the federal government to the remote reserve by the confluence of the Mingan River and the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence.

But these days, we have the opportunity to attend the spectacle of the epic origins of native people, as described in the film “We Giants”. We are able to get to know the sea routes traced by the Inuit community on Baffin Island and Greenland, thanks to the intrepid crossing of a great Shaman. These routes have been changing the polar region. But there are also spots for contemporary titanic exploits, like the one described in “Xingu Incayal” (nominated for Teueikan) or the one that takes us to the reality of humble artisans who carry the rest of the world on their shoulders (Karitonytch).

In this edition, there are two fundamental stories that were permeated by the Jury: the winner of the grand prize Teueikan “Winter in the blood” (http://winterinthebloodfilm.com – trailer: http://vimeo.com/51230755) and the Second Prize, “Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth”. The film, signed by Alex and Andrew Smith, puts of another step in the native filmography: a production that “brings to the screen, boldly and faithfully, to the best work marking Amerindian flowering of contemporary literature.” as noted by the jury. An award that adds value “to script illustrating the distraught and erratic journey hero with just enough ironic distancing and emotional proximity, in with realism meets at every turn wild imaginings of a therapeutic odyssey.”

“Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth” (trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d4X6SOsgBs) a German production signed by Eric Blanck and Frauke Sanding that emphasizes “men and women of flesh and blood, who in Their humble everyday lives, carry on a very ancient legacy, its wisdom, its worldview and its universality”. This movie emerge us into the Mayan civilization through the images of these directors who has won some prizes with this film (including the Best Cinematography Prize and the Best Documentary Prize at this year in the First Peoples Festival). http://www.heart-of-sky.com

The Grand Prize was handed by Rigoberta Menchú to Gold Fever, by JT Haines, Tommy Haines and Andrew Sherburne, which emphasizes the conditions and practices, which happened in the rural miner city: San Miguel de Ixtahuacan: “For showing how the North American corporation, driven by an unhealthy thirst for fold, closes its eyes to the reprehensible activities of the groups mining for it. for its compelling portrait of brave women who defend the Maya people’s territorial rights “.

The stories are thrilling as much as the Second Prize – “Point de fuite” by Stephen A. Smith and Julia Szucs, who explore in their artwork the beauty of the history of the Inuit nation.

From histories, from tales, from the reality which defeateds told , from conquerors , from fiction. A festival to inmmerse on the ancient culture that has known how to link to the present: The culture of the natives that meet together on First Peoples Festival.

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