IMAGINENATIVE FILM + MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West), through Sunday (October 18). imaginenative.org. Rating: NNN
Screening 145 features, shorts and documentaries in just five days, the 16th ImagineNative film festival offers Toronto audiences a vivid and varied selection of aboriginal cinema.
As always, there’s a good mixture of films you may have missed at other festivals – including the Maori action picture The Dead Lands (Thursday, 8 pm), which played TIFF last year, and Adam Garnet Jones’s Fire Song (Sunday, 6 pm), which premiered at this year’s TIFF just last month – and others that likely wouldn’t make it here at all without ImagineNative’s support.
I was really impressed with Quebec director Sonia Boileau’s feature debut Le Dep (Friday, 1:30 pm). Set over a wintry night on the outskirts of an Innu community, it’s a tense, well-observed drama starring Eve Ringuette as a young woman whose night shift at her father’s convenience store is violently interrupted when a masked gunman bursts in.
The Redfern Story shows how theatre transformed a community.
A decade’s worth of political and social change is captured in Australian documentarian Darlene Johnson’s The Redfern Story (Saturday, noon), about the establishment of the National Black Theatre in Sydney’s Redfern neighbourhood. In the late 60s and early 70s, when race relations were fraying, the theatre transformed a community from a racial flashpoint to an artistic hotbed. I’d likely never have heard of Redfern if ImagineNative hadn’t programmed this doc.
Still, they can’t all be gems, which brings us to The Last Saint (Friday, 8 pm), a New Zealand crime drama from writer/director Rene Naufahu about an Auckland teen (Beulah Koale) caught between drug dealing and his better instincts. Naufahu, an actor making his debut behind the camera, made this film for very little money, and the seams show constantly. He’s also a big fan of intensity, which translates to hyperactive camerawork and all his characters shouting at each other all the time.
Returning features include the Witching Hour horror program (Friday, 10:45 pm) with Greenland film When The Darkness Comes, and an international spotlight on Scandinavia’s indigenous Sámi nation with a screening of Nils Gaup’s 1987 adventure Pathfinder (Thursday, 12:15 pm) and a shorts program (Friday, 6:30 pm).
There’s also a salute to Cherokee filmmaker Heather Rae, with her 2005 documentary Trudell (Thursday, 3 pm), about the life of American Indian Movement chairman and activist John Trudell, plus a selection of films she’s produced, including the Oscar-nominated Melissa Leo drama Frozen River (Saturday, 2:15 pm) and writer/director Russell Friedenberg’s new horror movie, Wind Walkers (Saturday, 10 pm).
Remember what I said about how they can’t all be gems? Yeah, that applies to Wind Walkers, too.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
