by MATTHEW HAYS

This year’s First Peoples’ Festival will be held with a sense of sorrow and loss. Its co-founder, Myra Cree, who presided over the fest’s first 15 incarnations, died last year after a battle with cancer. An outspoken Radio-Canada journalist, Cree was regarded as a tireless advocate for aboriginal issues.

So the 2006 edition will be presided over by local hero Alanis Obomsawin. The internationally acclaimed, award-winning filmmaker is overseeing an increasingly ambitious festival, featuring almost 100 films and videos as well as literary readings and visual arts exhibitions.

To be sure, Obomsawin reflects the growing involvement of native artists in cinema. The multimedia artist has long recognized the need for greater representation and illustration of native histories in the public arena. Her long list of accomplishments—films include No Address (1988), Walker (1992) and Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000) among many others—are a distinct point of pride. Thus Obomsawin is the perfect person to carry the tradition of the First Peoples’ Festival.

Perhaps most noteworthy in the premiere department of this year’s fest would be Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis. Shot last summer in and around Montreal, this miniseries revisits that painful period in which a standoff occurred between police and the military and Mohawk natives in the Kanehsatake and Kahnawake communities. Obomsawin explored this crisis brilliantly in her NFB doc Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. Here, the story is retold dramatically, directed by Gil Cardinal, produced by Claudio Luca and starring Alex Rice, Tony Nardi, Gary Farmer and Tantoo Cardinal. The story of this crisis still manages to ignite passions and remains timely, given recent standoffs between police and native protestors.

Another premiere arrives with the screening of A Bride of the Seventh Heaven, a feature by Nenet filmmakers Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio (Seven Songs From the Tundra).

The documentary Trudell will have its Montreal premiere. The critically praised doc profiles Amerindian poet and activist John Trudell. Also screening, Brocket 99: Rockin’ the Country, Nilesh Patel’s film about the impact an audiotape parody of native stereotypes had on the aboriginal community in the Canadian West.

Also of note is Kent Monkman’s Future Nation, in which a gay teen struggles with life on the reserve after being outed to his older sister and homophobic brother; Zoe Leigh Hopkins’ One Eyed Dogs Are Free, in which a young man mourns the loss of his father who died at sea; and Lorne Cardinal’s Renegadepress.com, in which two native youth explore what’s really going on in their community through creating an e-zine.

Beyond the medium of film, this year’s fest will include an exhibition of 15 contemporary Nunavik Inuit sculptors by the Canadian Guild of Crafts, an exhibition of selected works by Haida artist Robert Davidson at the McCord Museum and another exhibit of sculpture by Mohawk Steeve McComber.

The 16th Annual First Peoples’ Festival will take place from May 25–June 8 (film and indoor portion) and from June 21–25 (outdoor events). Info: 969-3009 or go to www.nativelynx.qc.ca

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