2000s,+continued

Canadian Films of the 2000s

Entrance Card: Outline the narratives of// The Fast Runner //and //Bearwalker.//  Discuss in relation to Indigenous worldviews.

Paper II Overview: See handout:

//The Fast Runner// (Zacharias Kunuck, 2001)
 * Igloolik is a community of 1200 people located on a small island in the north Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic with archeological evidence of 4000 years of continuous habitation. Throughout these millennia, with no written language, untold numbers of nomadic Inuit renewed their culture and traditional knowledge for every generation entirely through storytelling. **


 * //Atanarjuat// is part of this continuous stream of oral history carried forward into the new millennium through a marriage of Inuit storytelling skills and new technology. **


 * Atanarjuat is Canada's first feature-length fiction film written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit. An exciting action thriller set in ancient Igloolik, the film unfolds as a life-threatening struggle between powerful natural and supernatural characters. **

Centuries ago, in what would become the Canadian Arctic, Atuat is promised to the malevolent Oki, son of the leader of their tribe. But Atuat loves the good-natured Atanarjuat, who ultimately finds a way to marry her. Oki's sister, Puja also fancies Atanarjuat, and when she causes strife between him and his brother Amaqjuaq, Oki seizes the opportunity to wreak a terrible revenge on Atanarjuat.


 * //Atanarjuat// gives international audiences a more authentic view of Inuit culture and oral tradition than ever before, from the inside and through Inuit eyes. For countless generations, Igloolik elders have kept the legend of Atanarjuat alive to teach young Inuit the danger of setting personal desire above the needs of the group. **

//Bearwalker// (Shirley Cheechoo, 2000)



Shirley Cheechoo’s Backroads (Bearwalker) is the dramatic and passionate story of a First Nations family struggling for justice and dignity. Set in the 1970s on a reservation on Manitoulin Island in Quebec, it focuses on the lives of four sisters who must confront the poverty and harsh environment of life in a stagnant and insular community in the Canadian backwoods. The difficult conditions of their lives are compounded by the abusive and entrenched prejudice of much of the local populace. Based on Cheechoo’s real-life experience, Backroads has a powerful authenticity that resonates through it and underscores its very recognizable dilemmas. When one of the sisters, Ella Lee, is attacked by her ex-employer, it triggers a sequence of murderous events that lead to her arrest and incarceration, where her life is threatened by a racist and embittered cop. The fortuitous return of her sister, Grace, who made it off the reservation and became a lawyer, offers hope for a legal remedy and an accurate recounting of the truth. But the ultimate resolution of the situation is also influenced by the proscribed and biased systems of this fractured municipality. Cheechoo’s depiction of a contentious, somewhat-dysfunctional family nevertheless produces fully realized women of great strength and pride. With a voice that is vibrant and broad ranging, sometimes angry and often humorous, Cheechoo reveals herself as a filmmaker of great talent and insight. As an all-too-rare window into a Native world that still suffers grim obstacles to basic rights yet is equally infused with enchantment and vision, Backroads is a uniquely fulfilling portrait. — Geoffrey Gilmore

[|Shirley Cheechoo]

[|Shirley Cheechoo interview]

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">[|Shirley Cheechoo Indian Schools]

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 20px;">//Brand Upon the Brain!// (Guy Maddin, 2006)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">Guy Maddin reluctantly returns to his childhood home, an abandoned Canadian island, where his parents ran an orphanage. As Guy fulfills his dying mother's request to paint the lighthouse which served as the orphanage, memories of strange events there overpower him. An undercover investigation by child author/detective Wendy & a revolt by the repressed children, blew open a cover-up by Guy's parents. Wendy disguised herself as her brother Chance and discovered that Maddin's inventor father performed outré scientific experiments on the orphans.

Updated: Wed., May. 9, 2007, 5:00 AM

=<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">SEX, TORTURE, TWINS - THE USUAL = <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">By LOU LUMENICK <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 0.6em;">//Last Updated://5:00 AM, May 9, 2007 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 0.6em;">//Posted://5:00 AM, May 9, 2007 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">NOT many people are making silent horror serials these days, but Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin pushes his love of lurid melodrama to the limit in his latest demented treat, "Brand Upon the Brain!" As Maddin demonstrated in "The Saddest Music in the World" (in which Isabella Rossellini had two prosthetic legs filled with beer), no situation is too bizarre for this brilliant visualist. Here he's presenting a mock autobiographical work - a 12-chapter psychosexual fantasia unreeling in the mind of one Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs) as he returns after three decades to the remote island where he lived as a child. The overbearing Mother (Gretchen Krich), who communicates with young Guy (Sullivan Brown) with a emotion-powered portable telephone, runs an orphanage on the island. The orphans are subjected to surgical brain experiments conducted by Guy's father (Todd Jefferson Moore), a mad inventor. Their experiments attract the scrutiny of twin detectives Wendy and Chance Hale (both played by Katherine E. Scharhon). Guy quickly becomes smitten with Wendy, but things get confusing when Chance departs the island - and Wendy stays behind but starts masquerading as her brother. Guy's own sister (Maya Lawson) develops a crush on "Chance," not realizing she's Wendy in disguise. Wendy doesn't discourage Sis' affections. Meanwhile, Guy is confused by his own attraction to "Chance." Mom tries to discourage Sis, but she has her own issues: She becomes younger every time she has sex with Father, and their experiments are heading toward an especially gruesome climax.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 20px;">//Heaven on Earth// (Deepa Mehta, 2008)



<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">Chand, a young Punjabi woman, travels to Canada to marry a man she has never met. They live in a crowded suburban house and Chand has to also put up with her husband's abusive behavior.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 20px;">//Chloe//(Atom Egoyan, 2009)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 20px;">

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">A doctor hires an escort to seduce her husband, whom she suspects of cheating, though unforeseen events put the family in danger.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 20px;">//Barney’s Version// (Richard J. Lewis, 2010).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">The picaresque and touching story of the politically incorrect, fully lived life of the impulsive, irascible and fearlessly blunt Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 20px;">Film Screening: //Away from Her// (Sarah Polley, 2006)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 20px;">

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">A man coping with the institutionalization of his wife because of Alzheimer's disease faces an epiphany when she transfers her affections to another man, Aubrey, a wheelchair-bound mute who also is a patient at the nursing home.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 20px;">Assignment: Read chapters 23 and 24, //Cinema of Latin America// for next week and prepare for EC.