The 5th annual American Indian Stories N’ Motion Film Festival held at Haskell Indian Nations University is proud to bring in American Indian director Chris Eyre to this year’s event. Mr. Eyre is a Sundance Film Festival Audience Award Winner with his movie “Smoke Signals” since then he has spanned over to work in prime time television with NBC’s “Friday Night Lights and an episode of NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” Eyre also will have a project coming up on PBS’s "WE SHALL REMAIN" which is billed as one of the most ambitious television series on Native history ever produced.
The film festival will start Friday evening at 6pm at the Haskell Indian Nations University Auditorium in Lawrence, Kansas with a showing of Eyre’s movie “Imprint” a discussion will also follow with Mr. Eyre. Saturday April 18th the films start at 1pm in the afternoon with various Native American films including Water Buster, From Brooklyn and Back, Club Native, Youth NDN Depression, Fry Bread Babes, and the premiere of the Stories N’ Motion film “Hellway” produced by the students in the film club.
Friday April 17th
7:00 pm –“Imprint”
Shayla Stonefeather, a Native American attorney prosecuting a Lakota teen in a controversial murder trial, returns to the reservation to say goodbye to her dying father. After the teen is killed, she hears ghostly voices and sees strange visions that cause her to re-examine beliefs she thought she left behind
8:30 pm – Question and Answer Session with Produce/Director Chris Eyre, Meet and greet to follow.
Saturday April 18th
1:00 pm – “Lands End: Iti Humma” (15 min Trailer)
At Lands End - Iti Houma details the immediate and long standing issues of The United Houma Nation, who live in south Louisiana on the edge of the gulf. In 2005 when hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated their communities, no federal aid was provided to them. This brought to light the serious consequences of not being a federally recognized tribe. For decades, their issues have been ignored, dismissed and denied. After a century of land thefts by politicians, land speculators, fur interest and oil companies, the Houma find themselves in a precarious position atop fast disappearing wetlands
1:20 – Youth NDN Depression
1:30 – “Haskell Indians”
2:00 – “Water Buster”
a documentary chronicling the dislocation and relocation of the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara Nation of North Dakota due to a dam that inundated their homeland along the banks of the Missouri River. It is also the personal story of the director's family, whose life choices were influenced by this powerful reshaping of the landscape.The film examines the events that led up to the building of the Garrison Dam, the flooding of 156,000 acres of prime, agricultural bottomland on the Fort Berthold Reservation, and the resulting responses of a people who have survived centuries of hardship through adaptation and resiliency. This story explores identity, highlighting the universal struggle we all face in 21st century America to find a sense of place, a community and a home
3:15 – “Frybread Babes”
Explores body image and identity among Native American women today. Exclusive interviews with Native women from across Indian Country are featured in this powerful and intimate documentary.
3:45 – Little Caughnawaga: To Brooklyn and Back
The filmmaker explores her roots and traces the connections of her family from the Kahnawake Reserve outside Montreal to the 10-square block area in Brooklyn known as Little Caughnawaga. There, while the Mohawk ironworkers were building Manhattan’s iconic skyscrapers, the women sustained a vibrant community far from home.
4:45 – “The Agony”
Friends spring to the aid of their friend when he is in dire need of medical attention. Hilarity Ensues.
6:00 pm – “Club Native”
Tracey Deer grew up on the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake with two very firm but unspoken rules drummed into her by the collective force of the community. These rules were very simple and they carried severe repercussions: 1) Do not marry a white person, 2) Do not have a child with a white person.
The consequences of ignoring these rules were equally simple: 1) Lose all status as a Native person and, 2) Deny your unborn child their status as a Native person. The larger tragedy, of course, was that by breaking either of these rules, she would be depleting the growth of “the Nation” and, by extension, betraying everyone she loved.
In Club Native, Deer looks deeply into the history and present-day reality of Aboriginal identity. With moving stories from a range of characters from her Kahnawake Reserve - characters on both sides of the critical blood-quantum line - she reveals the divisive legacy of more than a hundred years of discriminatory and sexist government policy and reveals the lingering “blood quantum” ideals, snobby attitudes and outright racism that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community.
7:30pm – “The Battle for White Clay”
The State of Nebraska’s refusal to halt alcohol sales to the dry Pine Ridge Indian Reservation from its border town of Whiteclay gets an in-depth look in this new documentary about a century-old problem. Four off-sale beer stores in this 14-person hamlet sell over 11,000 cans of beer a day to an Indian clientele with virtually no legal place to drink it. Struggling with crippling poverty and epidemic alcohol abuse that afflicts 4 out of 5 families, the Oglala Sioux Tribe has for decades banned the sale and possession of alcohol on their reservation.
The Battle for Whiteclay follows Indian activists Frank LaMere, Duane Martin Sr. and Russell Means through the streets of Whiteclay to the halls of Nebraska’s State Capitol in their efforts to end alcohol sales in the place many have dubbed “skid row on the prairie.” Here is an inside look at an important contemporary conflict pitting American Indian rights against state and local governments in the United States.
9pm – Stories N Motion Premiere of “HELLWAY”
Four college teens discover the Legend of Stull, Kansas and its “Gateway To Hell”. How can they pass up the chance to party on the devils doorstep? What they don’t know is that something has followed them back from “Gateway” Written, Directed, Produced and Starring Members of the Haskell Film Club “Stories N Motion”
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