culture
imagineNATIVE Celebrates Indigenous Cinema Cultures
Toronto's 12th annual aboriginal film festival highlights inventive and incendiary international works.
Hout Bay dwellers protest their forced eviction in Dylan Valley's The Uprising of Hangberg.
imagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
October 19–23, various times
Single tickets $7–$12, all-access pass $110
Fall in Toronto means film festivals galore, from the enviro-conscious Planet in Focus, to Reel Asian’s Eastern-themed offerings, to the gore-splattered selections at Toronto After Dark (which we previewed yesterday). Now in it’s twelfth installment, the imagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival is also a fall fixture, showcasing the cinematic talents of the world’s many indigenous cultures. This year’s principle screening venue is TIFF’s Bell Lightbox, which, beginning tonight, will host the majority of the festival’s 103 features and shorts, including a spotlight on South Africa’s Khoi-San aboriginal community.
Indeed, in Shirley Adams and The Uprising of Hangberg, the spotlight program yields two of imagineNATIVE’s standout selections. The festival’s October 20 screening is actually a return to Toronto for Shirley Adams, which appeared at TIFF in 2009, and whose director, Oliver Hermanus, also brought Beauty to TIFF ’11. Featuring a deservedly award-winning performance from South African veteran Denise Newman, Hermanus’ precocious debut is a stirring portrait of desperate maternal defiance. Newman plays the titular Adams, a “coloured” woman who leaves her job to care for her teenage son, rendered tetraplegic and suicidal by a stray bullet. Abandoned by a husband unable to cope, Adams’ story is hardly light viewing, but Hermanus deftly avoids overwrought sentiment. He also avoids belabouring the film’s socio-political themes, though the legacy of Apartheid is a palpable factor in Adams’ forlorn struggle, brilliantly conveyed via Newman’s bravura turn, and Jamie Ramsay’s artful lensing.
The Uprising of Hangberg, in contrast, is jarringly raw, and, at times, scarcely resembles a professional piece of filmmaking. Despite such manifest technical shortcomings, it merits a mention as vivid evidence of the violent subjugation of a disenfranchised community. Dylan Valley’s documentary is a first-hand account of government efforts to forcibly displace dozens of Khoi-San residents who have erected unauthorized dwellings near Cape Town’s coastal suburb of Hout Bay, which is home to some of South Africa’s most affluent citizens. Uprising records the events and aftermath of September 21, 2010, when armed authorities descended on the settlement in a hail of rubber bullets, targeting and, in several cases, maiming men, women, children, and the elderly. Valley’s account is hampered by a lack of context, and makes little attempt to articulate the government’s version of events, but remains a damning indictment, too troubling to ignore. The Uprising of Hangberg screens on October 21, and like all pre-6 p.m. screenings, is free to students, seniors, and the underemployed.
Josiah Patkotak struggles for a moral foothold in Andrew Okpeaha MacLean's On the Ice.
Other imagineNATIVE highlights include opening night selection On the Ice, winner of the Best First Feature Prize at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, and the world premiere of Mesnak, an intriguing re-imagining of Hamlet. Like last year’s sensational, Ozarks-set Winter’s Bone, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s On the Ice is part teen suspense thriller, part cultural curio, transplanting a familiar, high-stakes narrative to a remote Iñupiat settlement in northern Alaska. The story of a friendship frayed by the fallout of a tragic mishap, Maclean’s feature is by no means as accomplished as Debra Granik’s Best Picture nominee—its plotting and lead performances are competent, some supporting efforts less so—but it is genuinely notable for its evocation of contemporary Iñupiat youth culture, and for a setting tailor-made for mortal drama and an elemental moral quandary.
Mesnak, too, transplants a familiar story to a new setting, re-casting Shakespeare’s cherished tragedy as a present-day melodrama set on an Innu reservation. Writer-director Yves Sioui Durand has authored 15 stage plays, including 2004’s Hamlet-Le Malécite, on which Mesnak is based, and the film marks his adventurous, remarkably assured screen debut. In Durand’s version, the Danish prince becomes Dave (promising newcomer Victor Turgeon), born to Innu parents before being adopted and raised in Montreal. Dave returns to his native community when he receives what he believes to be a letter from his mother, Gertrude, who is engaged to marry Claude, chief of the local band. When Dave arrives, he encounters the capricious Osalic (Eve Ringuette), and a doomed romance blossoms. Durand weaves Hamlet’s original elements of intrigue and incest into a pointed allegory for the loss of indigenous identity, and a singularly successful embodiment of imagineNATIVE’s ethos. Mesnak screens on October 20.
Images courtesy of imagineNATIVE. For tickets and a full schedule of the festival’s screenings, exhibitions, and events visit imaginenative.org