Resilient film

Circle Cinema spotlights Native American filmmakers

On August 10, Circle Cinema will host the second installment of Native Spotlight, a quarterly film series. “I Stand: Guardians of the Water” (2017), a feature-length documentary by Kyle Kauwika Harris (Choctaw), will make its Tulsa premiere, and the documentary short “Dig It If You Can” (2016) by Kyle Bell (Thlopthlocco) will also be screened. Cherokee chef Bradley James Dry will cater the reception.

The series and films are intended to promote a variety of Native American and indigenous experiences and perspectives. Another focus of the series is to give filmmakers a chance to interact with their audiences and share experiences about their lives and work.

The quarterly series, sponsored by the Flint Family Foundation and Tulsa Office of Film, Music, Arts, and Culture, debuted in April with Navajo director Blackhorse Lowe’s “Chasing the Light” (2016), an experimental film that cuts through stereotypes of Native Americans engrained by mainstream media.

“I think showing something like that right off the bat was a strong stand about what the series will be,” said Chuck Foxen, series programmer at Circle Cinema.

Harris’ “I Stand” casts a new light on the resilience of Standing Rock protesters, exploring the effects of the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and the community of Bismarck, North Dakota.

In “Dig It If You Can,” Bell follows Kiowa-Choctaw mixed-media artist Steven Paul Judd for several months as he works on his Photoshop pieces, street art, and explores how young indigenous peoples can see themselves in all aspects of life. “Dig It If You Can” was awarded Best Documentary Short at the 2016 American Indian Film Festival and Best Short Film Cinematographer at the Tulsa American Film Festival.

“I can only portray how we are right now as Native Americans,” Bell said. “We’re not in tipis, we’re not riding horses, we’re kind of integrated in this modern world, you know?”

Both Harris and Bell started their work as filmmakers about three years ago. Before fully investing in film, they worked day jobs and dreamt about telling Native stories.

“It’s really hard for a Native American filmmaker to get a film made,” Harris said. “I think if you’re going the traditional producer route, or what not, you’re gonna hit all kind of bumps in the road … the tribes are directly responsible for making those films come to life.”

Through the Delaware tribe, Harris found support for his first feature documentary, “The Water Gap: Return to the Homeland (2016),” which follows young people in three Lenape tribes as they visit the Delaware Water Gap—their ancestral homelands—for the first time. “The Water Gap” won the Manetuwak Good Medicine Award at the 19th annual Native American Film Festival of the Southeast in Columbia, South Carolina.

“I Stand” finds a voice that had been lost in the large-scale reportage of the protests at Standing Rock. Although he was working with a small crew, limited time onsite, and a shoestring budget, Harris captured a heartfelt look at an event that most only experienced through news networks.

“Any filmmaker can just say, ‘Okay, this is a huge event, I’m gonna go up here and make a film.’” Harris said about Standing Rock. “But after looking at it I was like, ‘What’s the bigger story here?’ When I was asking the tribes in Oklahoma, ‘What is it that doesn’t make sense about this?’ and they were like, ‘Well, all we see is the cellphone footage going on every day, I don’t know what’s really going on’ … I wanted to answer the questions that I guess weren’t getting answered.”

“I think whenever you watch a film—or any kind of art—you’re trying to find the truth of things,” Foxen said. “I think it just helps facilitate that if a Native person is telling Native stories.”

As a long-term project, the Native Spotlight series will continue to facilitate the presentation of Native stories and conversations about Native issues by screening Native and indigenous films and hosting Native filmmakers across genres.

For more from Mason, read his article on Tulsa Community College’s Corrections Education Program.