KANEHSATAKE: 270 YEARS OF RESISTANCE (Alanis Obomsawin, Canada). 119 minutes. Sunday (May 10), 2 pm, ROM. Rating: NNNNN
Alanis Obomsawin is this year’s recipient of the Hot Docs Outstanding Achievement Award, and the festival honours her with a retrospective of her work. Perhaps Obomsawin’s best-known work, Kanehsatake chronicles the Mohawk standoff at Oka, Quebec, which lasted 78 days in the summer of 1990, bringing tensions between First Nations and the Canadian government to the boiling point.
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Obomsawin was there for all of it, capturing people on both sides of the conflict at their best and worst, and breaking up her reportage with social and historical context that explores the centuries of political betrayals and resentment that led to the current situation.
Two decades on, this remains an essential Canadian documentary.