Films 2006 ticket information

Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis

Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis is a fiction based on the headline news event that took place in the summer of 1990 in Oka, Quebec. The largest deployment of Canadian troops since the Korean War move into the town of Oka to dismantle blockades by Mohawk Indians - who were protesting against the towns plans to build on Mohawks sacred land. The protestors block the road leading to the cemetery. The police attack and try to remove the protestors by force in a fiasco of a raid and, tragically, an officer was killed. What started out as a minor protest erupts into a major crisis and a national stage for Indian Rights everywhere in the country.

Rated Mature Themes, Violence

Gang Aftermath

Gang Aftermath is a documentary film exploring the issue of Canadian street gangs from an Aboriginal perspective. With insights from current and former gang members, Gang Aftermath takes a no-holds-barred look at gang culture and lifestyle. Gang intervention and prevention programs are portrayed along with the journey of one individual who is determined to get out and stay out. Gang Aftermath dispels the myths and lays bare the truth about the inner workings of street gangs in Canada

Rated Coarse Language, Violence

The Challenge in Old Crow

In the Yukon's far north, two hundred eighty Aboriginals live in the village of Old Crow. In the 1950's Father Jean-Marie Mouchet set up a cross-country ski program whose purpose was to help restore the young people's self esteem. The program produced several champions, including Glenna, who is now a mother. In 2002, Glenna and Father Mouchet devised a new program, the Old Crow Health and Fitness Project, and overcame numerous obstacles to make it a reality. With compassion and insight, The Challenge in Old Crow shows how a handful of parents took control of the situation to ensure a future for their children. Their story is a superb illustration of commitment and perseverance.

Rated

Pigeon Pow Wow

This short film relates the natural movement of Pigeons to a traditional Aboriginal drumbeat.

Rated

Dude vs.Dude

Watch these two Dudes duke it out for a slice of pizza in this hilarious sequence of movie parodies.

Rated

The Salt Song Trail

Through the beautiful landscape of the Colorado Plateau, painted deserts and river valleys, The Salt Song Trail traces the journeys of ancestral peoples to historic and sacred sites. The film also documents a healing ceremony at the Sherman Institute, a former boarding school that housed Native children who had been forcibly taken from their homes and forbidden to practice their traditional culture and language.

Rated

My Father, My Teacher

My Father, My Teacher is an eloquent reflection of the bonds and tensions faced by all families. It is also an extraordinary look at the handing down of a precious family legacy from a father to his son.

Rated

Bonfire

When life's hardships pile up will this youth choose to escape?

Rated

Aboriginal Architecture: Living Architecture

Everyone is familiar with certain types of Aboriginal architecture. Traditional igloos and tepees are two of the most enduring symbols of North America itself. But how much do we really know about the types of structures Native Peoples designed, engineered and built? Featuring expert commentary and stunning imagery, Aboriginal Architecture Living Architecture provides a virtual tour of seven Aboriginal communities – Pueblo, Mohawk, Inuit, Crow, Navajo, Coast Salish and Haida – revealing how each is actively reinterpreting and adapting traditional forms for contemporary purposes.

Rated

The Kaipara Affair

The Kaipara Harbour may look like paradise, but the depletion of fish and seafood has long been a subject of grave concern to the locals. Barry Barclay's documentary takes us inside their struggle to obtain government support to rescue a vital natural resource. Barclay relishes the range of personalities, cultures and tactics that rub together here. Barclay depicts an alarming systemic disconnection between faceless state bureaucracy and democratic process, locating Kaipara's affairs in the universal context of humanity's yearning for constitutional justice and peace.

Rated

Johnny Tootall

Discharged from the Bosnian War, Johnny carries the weight of this war on his shoulders. He left combat with a dark and frightening secret- the murder of a young boy, which haunts him. But Johnny carries many demons: the death of his father, running from his destiny as Chief of his Band, and abandoning Serena the love of his life. Nevertheless, Johnny must return home. The wolf spirit has called.

Rated

Disappearances

Based on the award-winning novel by Howard Frank Mosher, Disappearances is a spellbinding tale of high-stakes whiskey-smuggling, a family's mysterious past, and a young boy's rite of passage. Quebec Bill, desperate to raise money to preserve his endangered cattle herd at the end of a long winter, resorts to whiskey smuggling, a traditional family occupation. He takes his son, Wild Bill, on an unforgettable journey that will long remain etched in the viewer's mind, through vast reaches of the Canadian wilderness and into a haunted and elusive past. What they find is the stuff of genuine legend.

Rated

The Ghost Riders

The Bigfoot Memorial Ride, an annual 300-mile journey on horseback, helps the Lakota Nation "wipe the tears" shed for the massacre of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in 1896, and for more recent hardships. Participants convey the ride's spirit of sacrifice and remembrance, and the Lakota people's determination to build a better future.

Rated

Silent Messengers

This extraordinary documentary explores the mysteries of the Inuksuit, those powerful objects that mark the pristine landscape of the North. As enigmatic as the stone slabs of Stonehenge, the Inuksuit are sacred signs of the Inuit and their ancestors – the first people to inhabit the Arctic. With acclaimed ethnogeographer and photographer Norman Hallendy and well-known sculptor-actor Natar Ungalaq (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) as their guides, the filmmakers traverse the open and sometimes forbidding terrain around Cape Dorset and Igloolik, in search of these stone symbols and their meanings.

Rated Nudity

Trespassing

Eight years in the making, Trespassing is a feature-length documentary film that poetically examines our fight for survival. By focusing on the battle around nuclear storage in the United States, the film carefully unpacks a deadly controversy around land rights, uranium mining, nuclear testing and the disposal of nuclear waste. Filmed in and around Native American sacred sites in Nevada's Yucca Mountain, Four-Corners and California's Mojave Desert, Trespassing captures the breathtaking beauty of the natural environment, while documenting the actions of indigenous people and others as they risk relocation, eviction and arrest to prevent further desecration of these lands, the air and the water by nuclear waste.

Rated

The Last of the Mohicans (1920)

The 1920 Classic Myth: The Last of the Mohicans is a black-and-white silent film with an all new film score by the award-winning Mohican composer Brent Michael Davids. Originally made in 1920 by Maurice Tourneur & Clarence Brown, The film features Barbara Bedford, Lillian Hall, Wallace Beery and Albert Rosco, with a young Boris Karloff as an Indian. Davids has created a visionary score for full orchestra that features Joe Myers on Guitar, and the Composer himself on American Indian flutes and his own signature Quartz Crystal Flute.

Rated

Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action

Filmed against some of America's most spectacular backdrops, from Alaska to Maine, Montana to New Mexico, this award winning film profiles Native American activists who are fighting to protect Indian lands, preserve their sovereignty and ensure the cultural survival of their peoples. A moving tribute to the power of grassroots organizing, Homeland is also a call-to-action against the current dismantling of thirty years of environmental laws.

Rated

A Thousand Roads

FREE Screening

The lives of four Native Americans take significant turns as they confront the crises that arise in a single day. A young Inupiat girl, a Navajo homeboy, a Mohawk stockbroker, and a Quechua healer journey through the epic landscapes of Alaska, New Mexico, Manhattan and Peru, drawing strength from their tribal pasts to transcend the challenges of the day and embrace the promises that await them.

Rated

Drag in tha' Peg

FREE Screening

The complex culture of downtown Winnipeg's aboriginal drag society is explored in this grassroots documentary.

Rated Not Recommended for Young Children

Momentum Smudge

FREE Screening

Christians have cathedrals, Muslims have mosques. For Native Canadians,used to praying in natural settings, all the world is a sacred space. But the props of Aboriginal spirituality – drums, chants and smouldering sweet grass – can draw unwanted attention in the city. Momentum Smudge witnesses how a small group of aboriginal women celebrate their rights to worship in the city – their way.

Rated

For the Love of the Land

This documentary explores the connection between the land and the artistic community in Saskatchewan. Cuthand interviewed thirty artists from a wide variety of genres and racial backgrounds. All explain their love of the land and the effect it has on their work. The land is a lead character as we move from genre to genre and explore this intriguing topic.

Rated

Our Community

Our Community is a film that reveals that, despite the cultural diversity and the challenges before them, the people of the Walgett, Lightning Ridge and Sheep Yard communities share a pride, passion, resilience and an inexorable spirit of "belonging". Throughout the film, past misconceptions about racial and economic divisions are clarified and benevolent bonds are celebrated.

Rated

Chi-mnissing – N-daa-yaan (Big Island – My Home)

The filmmaker takes you to an Island First Nation to unveil its beauty and unique history with spectacular visuals, a historical re-enactment and introduces some of the people who are fortunate enough to live on this island. However, a metaphor has been hanging around for decades that could change the live of the islanders forever.

Rated

Spirit Doctors

Lyrical and honest, filmmaker Marie Burke journeys inward into the spiritual world of traditional Native medicine, the world of Mary and Ed Louie. With a lifetime of experience in the ways of Native spirituality, Mary and Ed are steadfastly committed to the practices that keep them accountable to the spirit world, their people and Mother Earth. From the lush Smilkameen Valley of the interior to the cityscapes of Vancouver, British Columbia, Burke reveals a beautiful way of life rarely seen and explores the ongoing debate around the ethics of documenting such sacred ceremonial knowledge.

Rated