Many lenses on residential schools

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This article was published 23/11/2021 (1130 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival is doing its part to keep residential schools at the top of people’s minds.

The five-night event, which includes live screenings at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as well as opportunities to view films from home, begins tonight with a mixture of movies and music that honour those who were taken to the schools and those who didn’t return.

Tonight’s highlight is the film Portraits From a Fire (7 p.m., CMHR) by Vancouver director Trevor Mack, which takes a look at residential-school history through the eyes of a teenager who is fascinated with filmmaking.

“In the process, he comes across an old video camera at his house, he comes across what happened to his mother and the whole intergenerational trauma of residential schools,” says Coleen Rajotte, the festival’s founder.

Mack, who is Tsilhqot’in, whose people live near Williams Lake, B.C., earned an emerging-filmmaker award from the Vancouver International Film Festival earlier this year for the movie.

Lucien Spence, a singer-songwriter from Long Plain First Nation, will perform during the opening night as well, including a song called Lonely Child that he wrote in response to the discovery of 215 unmarked graves of children at a former residential school site in British Columbia.

Rajotte heard a demo of Lonely Child and knew Spence’s song had to be part of the festival’s kickoff.

“I listened to it and I had tears flowing,” she says. “It’s all about strength and perseverance, not only honouring the children who didn’t come home but it has a message of we’re going to get through this, we’re going to move forward, we’re going to survive.”

Residential-school survivors will speak to the song and the film during the evening as well.

“That’s how we’re starting the evening, on the theme of every child matters and honouring the children who didn’t make it home. I think that’s a fitting way to opening the festival,” Rajotte says.

Indigenous people across Canada have had greater opportunities to make, act and work in films, Rajotte says, and dedicated funding from agencies such as Telefilm and the Canada Council for the Arts have also opened the door to more Indigenous-led projects.

She remembers when the festival could only show a couple of short films by Manitoban directors, but in 2021, there are two feature films and several shorts for WAFF’s Manitoba Filmmakers Day, which is Thursday.

The first is 2020 horror film The Corruption of Divine Providence (5 p.m., CMHR), which will include a question-and-answer session with director Jeremy Torrie.

It is followed by Ste. Anne (7 p.m., CMHR), an experimental drama shot in Treaty 1 territory by Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette, who also acts in the movie, edited it and wrote the screenplay.

Other films to watch for include: The Transcenders (Friday, 7 p.m.) , a U.S. comedy about two Aboriginal Americans who struggle moving from their reservation to Los Angeles, and Tote Abuelo (Saturday, 6 p.m.), a Mexican film about a woman who learns about Tzotzil culture from her grandfather.

The festival shifts on Sunday to Merchants Corner, 541 Selkirk Ave., for screenings of Daughter of a Lost Bird (noon), a U.S. film that focuses on an adoptee reconnecting with her birth family and Brother I Cry (7 p.m.), a film by New Brunswick director Jesse Anthony that follows a young First Nations man struggling with addictions while receiving support from his girlfriend, sister, mother and unborn daughter.

Visit waff.eventive.org for a full festival schedule and links to obtaining tickets.

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall