Post by blackcrowheart on Oct 11, 2006 17:08:59 GMT -5
Still crankin’ ’em out
By martin dunphy
Publish Date: 5-Oct-2006
Alanis Obomsawin is truly a one-of-a-kind Canadian filmmaker. The prolific Native documentarian, now 74, has devoted half her life to creating and directing videos, feature docs, shorts, and educational films in the service of her Abenaki people and First Nations communities across Canada. She has won a Governor General’s Award and received the Order of Canada. The U.S.–born Obomsawin—as a baby, she moved with her family to Quebec’s Odanak reserve, about halfway between Montreal and Quebec City—kicked off her highly political phase in filmmaking with 1984’s Incident at Restigouche, and she followed that up over a seven-year period with a quartet of films dealing with the strife between the Mohawks and the Quebec government. The first of those, 1993’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, put a rocket under her national and international profile. “I think everyone’s life is political,” she told the Straight from her Montreal office. “I don’t think you can hide from that.” Obomsawin will be in Vancouver for the film-fest screenings of her latest NFB offering, Waban-Aki: People From Where the Sun Rises, on Tuesday and Thursday (October 10 and 12).
Waban-Aki is something of a departure for Obomsawin, a nostalgic but insightful and incisive return to her roots. “I’ve been making films for so long, and I just felt that I should make one of my own people. Now I feel very good knowing that they like the film, especially the young people.” She was referring to a nail-biting preview screening in Odanak. “It was incredible. I was worried that they wouldn’t like certain things, but they were standing and applauding and very happy.” And she’s not ready to pack it in. She says the NFB wants to put together a retrospective of her work, and she is interested now in focusing on a different subject. “What I really want to do is work with children, period. As long as I have my health; as long as I can. Right now, I feel great.”
By martin dunphy
Publish Date: 5-Oct-2006
Alanis Obomsawin is truly a one-of-a-kind Canadian filmmaker. The prolific Native documentarian, now 74, has devoted half her life to creating and directing videos, feature docs, shorts, and educational films in the service of her Abenaki people and First Nations communities across Canada. She has won a Governor General’s Award and received the Order of Canada. The U.S.–born Obomsawin—as a baby, she moved with her family to Quebec’s Odanak reserve, about halfway between Montreal and Quebec City—kicked off her highly political phase in filmmaking with 1984’s Incident at Restigouche, and she followed that up over a seven-year period with a quartet of films dealing with the strife between the Mohawks and the Quebec government. The first of those, 1993’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, put a rocket under her national and international profile. “I think everyone’s life is political,” she told the Straight from her Montreal office. “I don’t think you can hide from that.” Obomsawin will be in Vancouver for the film-fest screenings of her latest NFB offering, Waban-Aki: People From Where the Sun Rises, on Tuesday and Thursday (October 10 and 12).
Waban-Aki is something of a departure for Obomsawin, a nostalgic but insightful and incisive return to her roots. “I’ve been making films for so long, and I just felt that I should make one of my own people. Now I feel very good knowing that they like the film, especially the young people.” She was referring to a nail-biting preview screening in Odanak. “It was incredible. I was worried that they wouldn’t like certain things, but they were standing and applauding and very happy.” And she’s not ready to pack it in. She says the NFB wants to put together a retrospective of her work, and she is interested now in focusing on a different subject. “What I really want to do is work with children, period. As long as I have my health; as long as I can. Right now, I feel great.”