On this edition of Your Call, we celebrate this year's 48th annual American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco, which is screening nearly 60 feature films, shorts, music videos, and documentaries.
The American Indian Film Institute says its goals are inherently educational: to encourage Native and non-Native filmmakers to bring to the broader media culture the Native voices, viewpoints and stories that have been historically excluded from mainstream media; to develop Indian and non-Indian audiences for this work; and to advocate tirelessly for authentic visual and work-force representations of Indians in the media.
The festival runs from November 3-11 and many films be screened online.
Guests:
Mytia Zavala, Navajo, Pueblo of Laguna, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, enrolled member of the Fort Peck Sioux Tribe, and executive director of the American Indian Film Institute
Brooke Pepion Swaney, Blackfeet/Salish, director of the documentary Daughter of a Lost Bird, and faculty mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts' Low Residency MFA Program
Jonathan Elliot, Mohawk filmmaker from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, director of the short Ohskennón:ten Owí:ra (Little Deer), and member of the advisory board for Art With Impact
Web Resources:
The Los Angeles Times: Sundance Institute gets $4 million to support Indigenous filmmakers
USC Annenberg: Native American characters are nearly invisible in top films
The Hollywood Reporter: Just One Protagonist in the Top 1,600 Theatrical Films From the Last 16 Years Was Native American, Study Finds
The Nation: How Osage Nation Members Struck Back at Decades of Indigenous Misrepresentation in the Media
