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The National Film Board is touring its Indigenous cinema titles across the country for the Canada 150 anniversary, showing a large selection of the 280 Indigenous films, documentaries, animation, and features produced since 1968, bringing them to a wider audience.
Produced by Indigenous directors, the films chosen for the tour, called Aabiziingwashi (an Anishnaabe word which means “wide awake, unable to sleep”), provides a unique view of Canada and Canadian issues from an Indigenous perspective, said Michelle Van Beusekom, executive director of English Language Production at the film board.
The goal is to have a minimum 150 screenings across the country from titles from the collection, she said in an interview earlier this month with Jeremy Harpe of CFWE-FM.
Of the titles included is Marie Clements’ “The Road Forward”, described by Van Beusekom as a daring, audacious, musical documentary that tells the story of West Coast Indigenous activism.
It’s brand new, launched at Hot Docs in mid-May, and is making its way across the country.
Also available on the tour is “Angry Inuk”, which looks at the seal hunt through an Inuit perspective, and the devastating impact of the seal fur ban on the Inuit economy.
“Birth of a Family” can also be screened. Described as a “gorgeous” documentary about the Sixties Scoop, and four siblings who were taken from their mom when very young and who meet again for the first time in their 50s.
In the Harpe interview, Van Beusekom talks about the history of Indigenous cinema in the NFB, which she says really starts in 1968 with a film called “The Battle of Crowfoot” by director Willie Dunn. In the late sixties and early 70s, Alanis Obamsawin joins the film board, and “there’s a real surge in Indigenous film-making.” In the 1980s, things start to build with the NFB opening studios across the country, including in Edmonton.
Gil Cardinal, a “really amazing filmmaker” with films like “Foster Child” have become really seminal films in the canon of Indigenous cinema in Canada.
In 1989 in Edmonton, the NFB created Studio one, an Indigenous film studio, led by Carol Geddes and “that really created the foundation for that tradition of Indigenous-led production at the film board that we see today,” Van Beusekom.
Anyone from communities big or small can organize a screening. To take part in an Aabiziingwashi tour go mailto:wideawake@nfb.ca
The NFB will even help customize a screening.
Organizers of the Aabiziingwashi tour are hopeful the public will help them set up some tour dates to bring these films to communities across Canada so the films get a wider showing.
“There’s a lot of really amazing films for people to discover,” said Van Beusekom.
To view a complete and up-to-date list of screenings booked so far, visit http://nfb.ca/wideawake.
And there are a number of the films online at http://nfb.ca that are free for viewing.