Contrasting happy days, hard times
As Quebec marks its birthday, filmmaker shares stories of struggle
About 6 1/2 hours north of Boston by car, the city of Quebec is in the middle of a yearlong celebration of its 400th birthday. Among the many events (which are listed online at monquebec2008.com) is a "First Nations" program that pays homage to the country's native peoples, who lived in the region long before European settlers started claiming the territory as their own.
The Quebec festivities make the timing especially right for a retrospective of the works of Canadian documentarian Alanis Obomsawin. A 13-day event is taking place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this month, and a smaller version comes to the Museum of Fine Arts for four days - Wednesday through Saturday. Obomsawin will be at all screenings.
Obomsawin began making movies for the National Film Board of Canada 40 years ago and has produced more than 30 documentaries about the hard edges of the lives of aboriginal people. A member of the Abenaki Nation who was born in New Hampshire and raised on the Odanak Reserve near Montreal until she was 9, Obomsawin has documented police raids of reservation lands, homelessness among natives living in the big cities, and a wrenching incident in 1990 that pitted native peoples against the government over lands that were slated to be turned into a golf course.
The latter event took place in Oka, a town about an hour west of Montreal. It included a months-long armed standoff between Mohawks in the adjacent community of Kanehsatake and police and soldiers.
Obomsawin was on the inside and kept her cameras running. The extraordinary 1993 film "Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance" captures the enormous frustration and determination of natives over the still ongoing issue of territorial rights. The film went on to win 18 international awards. It plays Friday at 3 p.m.
"The land question and Mohawk sovereignty have been issues since the French and English first settled the area," Obomsawin said. "A lot of promises were made and never kept. What the confrontation of 1990 showed is that this is a generation that is not going to put up with what happened in the past."
The other films on the schedule are "Our Nationhood," from 2003 (Wednesday at 8 p.m.); "Incident at Restigouche," from 1984, and "Spudwrench-Kahnawake Man," from 1997 (Thursday at 3:45 p.m.); "Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises," from 2006 (Saturday at 10:30 a.m.); and Obomsawin's newest film, "Gene Boy Came Home," about a member of the Odanak peoples who served in Vietnam with the US Marines and then had a long, emotional path back (Saturday at 12:30 p.m.)
All films will be followed by a discussion with the director. The screening of "Gene Boy Came Home" will be followed by a panel discussion with documentarian Raquel Chapa, who is working on a film for PBS on the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and Melissa Bisagni, program manager of the Film and Video Center at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian.
Earlier this month, Obomsawin received the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. As Tom Perlmutter, commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada, put it, "Alanis is the first lady of First Nations Film." Further details about the program are available at 617-267-9300 and mfa.org/film.
ARMENIAN FILM FEST: A three-day, four-film program dubbed the Boston Armenian Film Festival plays the MFA Friday, Saturday, and next Sunday. It's the first of what many hope will be an annual event.
Organized by the Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance and co-presented by the Armenia Fund, USA, Inc., the films include "The Lark Farm," a 2007 drama about the Armenian genocide adapted from the novel by Antonia Arslan (Friday at 7:45 p.m.) and "Big Story in a Small City," a 2007 tragicomedy about a family that prepares a body for burial not realizing that they not only have the wrong body, but they have the body of the head of Armenia's organized crime families (Saturday at 7:45 p.m.).
A free panel discussion on issues facing young Armenian directors, with "Big Story" director Gor Kirakosian and others, follows at 9:30 p.m. Details are at mfa.org/film and armeniandrama.org.
FOR FILMMAKERS: "Making Media Now 2008" conference on the business of filmmaking, 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Friday at Bentley College in Waltham (filmmakerscollab.org) . . . The winning films from the Boston leg of the national Campus Movie Fest competition are now online at campusmoviefest.com/finale/boston08.
AND LOOKING AHEAD: The Provincetown International Film Festival, June 18-22, announced that Gael Garcia Bernal will receive the Excellence in Acting Award and Jane Lynch the Faith Hubley Memorial Award. Both are expected to be at the festival along with Quentin Tarantino, who will get the Filmmaker on The Edge Award. Madonna's directorial debut, "Filth and Wisdom," will be the opening-night feature (ptownfilmfest.org).
Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lbrokaw@globe.com. 