Hollywood has vehiculated a fake vision on the history of conquest by presenting Indigenous people as enemies of the white settlers, who had to be exterminated. Such vision is nowadays considered racist and irrelevant.
Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay refers to fiction films by Indigenous filmmakers as Fourth Cinema: “First Cinema being American cinema; Second Cinema Art House cinema; and Third Cinema the cinema of the so-called Third World”.
Two chapters will be studied this semester, both on fiction films written and directed by Indigenous filmmakers. Both movies illustrate two important realities that are part of Indigenous people’s recent and current social and historical struggles.
CHAPTER 1 Truth as weapon and medicine in Georgina Lightning’s Older than America (2008)
The film explores the devastating personal and cultural effects of the American Indian boarding schools on the members of a Native American family in Minnesota.
CHAPTER 2 The shadow of the ancestors in Sterlin Harjo’s Mekko (2015)
Mekko is a Native American man who is released from prison. He served time for accidentally killing a cousin. Homeless, he learns that he must fight the "witch" preying on his people because they have lost their spirit.
(For more details, see worksheet given in class)
Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay refers to fiction films by Indigenous filmmakers as Fourth Cinema: “First Cinema being American cinema; Second Cinema Art House cinema; and Third Cinema the cinema of the so-called Third World”.
Two chapters will be studied this semester, both on fiction films written and directed by Indigenous filmmakers. Both movies illustrate two important realities that are part of Indigenous people’s recent and current social and historical struggles.
CHAPTER 1 Truth as weapon and medicine in Georgina Lightning’s Older than America (2008)
The film explores the devastating personal and cultural effects of the American Indian boarding schools on the members of a Native American family in Minnesota.
CHAPTER 2 The shadow of the ancestors in Sterlin Harjo’s Mekko (2015)
Mekko is a Native American man who is released from prison. He served time for accidentally killing a cousin. Homeless, he learns that he must fight the "witch" preying on his people because they have lost their spirit.
(For more details, see worksheet given in class)
- Professor: Georges DE MEDTS