Three Americas and a film festival

>> Variety is the word on Montreal's Native film fest

by JOANNE LATIMER

Expect to be blown away. The 11th First Peoples' Festival includes a film and video section that is exhaustive and impressive--too broad to buttonhole into any one genre or theme. Over 60 submissions are competing for the two Mattiusi Iyaituk statuettes this year, and the entries range from devastating exposés to heart-warming celebrations of life in the three Americas.

Among the stellar round-up of films and videos, many stand out as must-see screenings. The first is Return of Navajo Boy, by Jeff Spitz. Navel-gazing filmmakers will love this documentary because it's about the effects of a film shoot on a Navajo family in Monument Valley in 1950. They were the main actors in John Ford's westerns, and their young son Jimmy starred in director William Kennedy's first black and white film. Kennedy's son found Jimmy, 50 years later, to show him the film for the first time.

What transpires is incredible. We learn that: a) actor icon John Wayne visited the shoot; b) Jimmy's baby brother, named after Wayne, was taken away from the family by government workers and raised by white people; and c) uranium threatens the family's health. John Wayne Sr. sent his namesake some cash to help him find his real family, but the reunion doesn't transpire as you'd expect. As with the best docs, truth is proven stranger--and far more complex--than fiction.

Equally devastating is Homeland, by Jilann Spitzmiller and Hank Rogerson. This is a major award-winning documentary on the festival circuit, and shouldn't be passed over. It recounts three generations of the Lakota family on the Pine Ridge Reserve in South Dakota. Appalling housing conditions, alcoholism, unemployment and dire poverty, however, cannot dampen the family's spirit. The filmmakers accidentally capture footage of an artists' brother escaping police custody, running away in handcuffs. The artist, apparently unfazed, simply keeps talking.

Closer to home, there's Finding Our Talk, Episode 1: Mohawk: Language Among the Skywalkers, by Paul Rickard. It's about how iron workers spoke Mohawk on building projects, often inventing words for modern tools like cranes and riveters. An Italian-American working on a New York construction site even picked up some Mohawk on the job, where it was the main language. Historian and politician Billy Two Rivers is informative and fun, as is a profile on Dorothy Lazore, who developed the first Mohawk immersion programs in Kahnawake.

For fiction, catch the world premiere of L'Autre Amérique, by Montrealer Jean-Pierre Masse. The making of this film is already urban legend, as Masse saw the project through with no money or network backing. It's an enchanting story about being torn between tradition and modernity.

Just to provide a little perspective, the First People's Festival is focusing on the 300th anniversary of the signing of the great Peace Treaty of Montreal. There are, accordingly, art exhibits, live concerts, light shows, workshops and dance events celebrating all of the Americas.

Screenings at the Cinémathèque québécoise and the NFB Cinema; for a timetable of events and screenings, go to www.nativeLynx.qc.ca