National Day for Truth and Reconciliation: A Screen-By-Screen Rundown
By Jim Slotek
The centerpiece event for Saturday’s third annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is set to take place where the Residential School era of our history became law.
Parliament Hill – situated on the unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation - will see a 90-minute multilingual commemoration, paying tribute to those who survived Residential Schools to tell about it, and to those who didn’t.
The event, featuring performances by First Nations, Inuit and Métis artists, will be carried live nationwide at 1 p.m. on CBC, City-TV and APTN.
Meanwhile, the day will be marked by programming on the big and small screen. Here are three Indigenous-themed Truth and Reconciliation Day screen events worth time and thought.
Cree skateboarder Joe Buffalo and his Chief Poundmaker board.
For those looking for a night out tonight, the Shorts Not Pants Film Festival is co-presenting, alongside the upcoming imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, a night of seven Indigenous short films Friday, Sept. 29 at the Carlton Cinema that are all over the map in terms of subject matter and mood.
By turns pertinent, passionate, playful and tragic, the collection includes some definite festival-worthy material. (The imagineNATIVE festival takes place in Toronto October 17-22, and then switches to an online streaming programme).
My favourite film in the Carlton programme is Joe Buffalo, a documentary by Amar Chebib and exec-produced by skateboarding superstar Tony Hawk.
Narrated by its title character, an Alberta-born Salmon Cree, and, it’s said, a descendant of Chief Poundmaker. Joe, who was among the last generation to attend Residential School, poured his anger into skating, and was considered good enough to turn pro. Anger, drugs and alcohol made him lose course, and it wasn’t until his forties that he cleaned up and took an unlikely run at pro tournaments, while also taking on the job of counsellor and skating coach to Indigenous youth.
Hawk’s name has given Joe Buffalo some U.S. visibility, just in time for awards season consideration as a documentary short.
Roxann Whitebean’s Rose is a tight little drama set during the “Sixties Scoop,” when Native children were adopted en masse by white parents. The title character, (Passion Diabo) is a pregnant Mohawk teen whose unborn baby is being pre-assigned to foster parents via the Catholic Church, despite the willingness of her boyfriend Michael (Jacob Whiteduc-Lavoie) to help raise the baby.
The dramatics that stick belong to two-spirited actor T'áncháy Redvers, who plays Liz, an adoption agent who was herself an adopted Mohawk, and who parrots the “for their own good” mantra towards her people. It’s hard to have an arc in a short film, but they do a fine job. Rose culminates in a rescue mission that seems unlikely, but inspiring.
And the whimsical youth-oriented work of Alberta Cree Barry Bilinsky – who has two films in the programme - is a discovery. His Kikino Kids, a comedy playlet acted with innocence by Tap Root Actors Academy from Kikino Métis Settlement, has a Little-Rascals-Meets-Early-Taika-Waititi vibe. From children playing at planning a marriage, to tween girls pooling their money to make Kraft Dinner and weiners, cuteness runs rampant. Tantoo Cardinal exec produced.
And Bilinsky’s Obscheenies, set in a children’s summer camp where supernatural “little people” bedevil the teenage counsellors, evokes the old Nickelodeon series Are You Afraid of the Dark in the best way, Indigenously.
Also on the big screen, for free, is Bad Press, a documentary about an independent newspaper in Muscogee Nation that fought tribal government overreach that sought to control election coverage. The free screening at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema at 2 p.m. Saturday will feature a Q&A with co-director Joe Peeler.
Fresh from the Toronto International Film Festival, Kim O’Bomsawin’s four-part Telling Our Story positions itself as an alternative history, with O’Bomsawin traveling thousands of kilometers in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick profiling the traditions, lives and oral histories of 11 different First Nations. The light, the dark, the whimsical and magical and the tragic are all there as the first two episodes make their CBC debut at 8 p.m. Saturday. Kaniehtiio Horn (Letterkenny, Reservation Dogs) narrates).
Finally, on the History Channel at 9 p.m. Saturday, Horn also narrates the two-hour finale of True Story, a two-part documentary that reenacts and interviews experts on the continuing impact of historical turning points like the Indian Act and the Sixties Scoop, with an eye towards learning from the past.