Five standout films mark Indigenous History Month in VIFF and MOV's Who We Are series
Running June 21 to July 1, the curated program travels from East Vancouver to the Canadian Arctic and New Zealand
Epic award-winner Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.
Taika Watiti’s Maori coming-of-age story Boy.
To mark Indigenous History Month, the Vancouver International Film Festival is partnering with the Museum of Vancouver to present the Who We Are film series.
Selected by Indigenous curators Rylan Friday, Jasmine Wilson, and Sharon Fortney, the five films will stream through VIFF Connect. The program launches on National Indigenous Peoples Day (June 21) and running until July 1. See the trailer below.
The movies span engaging stories from First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Maori filmmakers, with the curatorial goal of celebrating Indigenous voices in cinema, while showing the beauty, complexities, and vibrancies of Indigeneity around the globe. Themes of healing, resiliency, joy, laughter, pain and community are woven throughout.
Fire Song, by Canadian director Adam Garnet Jones, is a poetic drama about a gay Anishnabe teenager’s journey through love, loss, belonging, isolation, and ultimately self-acceptance while stamping out colonial ideologies on sexuality.
Canada’s Zacharias Kunuk takes audiences to the Inuit Arctic with Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. The story of a violent act that ruptures a closely knit group, and the epic quest for justice and healing that follows, is a cautionary tale based on an Inuit oral tradition. It won Cannes’ Camera d'or for Best First Feature and Best Canadian Feature Film when it debuted in 2001.
Boy, by celebrated director Taika Waititi, meanwhile, travels to New Zealand for a heart-warming and funny Maori coming-of-age story. There, an 11-year-old Boy must come to terms with the unexpected return of his father and the fact that he’s not the man his son wishes him to be.
VIFF 2019 Best BC Film winner The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is also on the roster. Directed by Canadian filmmakers Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn, it follows Aila (Tailfeathers) in real time, after she finds a pregnant Indigenous teen (Violet Nelson) sobbing on a rainy East Vancouver street, and tries to get her help.
And don’t miss Canadian director Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls, an audacious, genre-bending debut that takes the nightmare of residential schools as a jumping off point for a supernatural revenge thriller.
Find more info here.
Post sponsored by the Vancouver International Film Festival.