Hunt for the Wilderpeople

New Zealand Indigenous director Taika Waititi’s film is a comedic, generational family drama that demands repeated viewings. The young protagonist, Ricky, is a rebellious city kid who is sent to the countryside to reside with his loving Aunt Bella and crotchety Uncle Hec. The film soon finds the mismatched family members on the run in the wilderness trying to duck the foster-care system. A national manhunt ensues and heightens the drama just as the intangible bonds that make them a family begin to blossom. The acting is superb, the setting is breathtaking, the script is captivating, and as the credits roll you’ll understand why Waititi is being trusted to helm the next Thor film—he’s a director who gives his complex films a pulsing heartbeat.

Read more: Five Native Films You Should Be Streaming in 2017 by Ryan Winn, January 2, 2017, Tribal College Journal

Mekko

Mekko, the film named after its troubled protagonist, chronicles the life of a Native man who is released from prison after 19 years with no home or family. Mekko, played by Crow actor Rod Rondeaux, finds his place in a homeless indigenous community in Tulsa, but soon realizes he must face the ghosts and traditions of his past to fight the evil presence in his life. As Seminole-Muskogee director Sterlin Harjo's third feature film, the thriller premiered at the Los Angelese Film Festival in 2015 to critical acclaim.

Read more: Indigenous Cinema's Greatest Films by Braudie Blais-Billie, Nov. 15, 2016, I-D

One Heart - One Spirit

ONE HEART-ONE SPIRIT shows us the need to discover the threads and emotions that bind different cultures together, the harmony we need to ward off an apocalyptic future. Underneath the unnatural boundaries societies have created to mark their ways, their means, their lands, lies nations peopled by individuals who should seek the togetherness understood by the first nations. One Heart explores these themes by documenting the journey of Little Hawk, a Native North American, to the renowned Garma festival, Australia’s most significant Indigenous event, and a model for self-determination, reconciliation, Indigenous knowledge sharing, transfer and exchange.

Read more: One Heart movie review by David Greenberg, Dec. 10, 2016, One Heart Tribe

The Revenant wins Best Director at Red Nation Film Fest

Nov. 21, 2016 - Oscar Winning Director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, wins Best Director for The Revenant at the 13th Annual Red Nation Film Festival in Hollywood.

From Rolling Stone: Loosely based on the real-life adventure of a 19th-century American fur trapper named Hugh Glass, the film stars a prodigiously bearded Leonardo DiCaprio, who is mauled by a bear and then betrayed and left for dead by other members of his hunting party. The rest of the movie, on one level, is an immensely satisfying genre exercise, a proto-Western revenge fantasia in the tradition of Death Wish or Kill Bill, in which the audience endures the cruel sufferings of the protagonist as a pleasure-enhancing prelude to feats of impossible endurance, survival and bloody restitution.

Visually, the film is a spectacular throwback, the sort of epic rarely seen since the era of Lawrence of Arabia. It's also a sustained spiritual meditation, as well as an implicit critique of American capitalism, as told through its earliest incursions into the relatively untouched wilderness of the New World.

Read more: Alejandro G. Iñárritu: Hollywood's King of Pain by Mark Binelli, February 17, 2016, Rolling Stone

Mni Wiconi (Water is Life)

Online Movie Premiere, Mother Jones, November 15, 2016

Mni Wiconi ("Water is Life" in the Sioux language) doesn't aim to be an exhaustive document of the battle against this 1,172-mile oil pipeline. Rather, the film is an introduction to the conflict and the players at Standing Rock—"a primer," filmmaker Lucian Read says. The fight isn't over, after all. On Monday, the tribe seemed to get a reprievewhen the Army Corps of Engineers called for further analysis of the proposed pipeline route and consultation with tribal officials about their concerns. Standing Rock activists have declared Tuesday a "national day of action" against the pipeline, a project that is 95 percent complete despite the lack of the official easements and permits needed to finish it.

In addition to introducing key anti-pipeline figures, such as Standing Rock chairman Dave Archambault II and local landowner and activist LaDonna Allard, Read's nine-minute film is a lush visual explainer, a kaleidoscopic sketch of the conflict's root causes, from poverty to broken treaties to the "militarization of the oil industry," as one character puts it.

Read more: Dakota Pipeline Standoff by Wes Enzinna, November 15, 2016, Mother Jones

Embrace of the Serpent

Set in the Amazon rainforest, Embrace of the Serpent tells two stories, separated by decades but united in the person of indigenous Amazonian Karamakate. In the first storyline, set in 1909, Karamakate becomes the reluctant guide to Theodor Koch-Grunberg, a gravely ill German anthropologist who believes his only chance of recovery is by travelling deep into the forest to find a sacred plant once cultivated by Karamakate’s people which may or may not exist anymore (Karamakate’s people might not exist anymore either, as they have fled into the wilderness to escape encroaching rubber plantations). Several decades later, an aging Karamakate is recruited by an American scientist to retrace the journey of 1909; the American is ostensibly looking for the sacred plant, but may have ulterior motives. As we watch Karamakate’s journey unfold, we are witnesses to a series of nightmarish tableaux, as we see the depredations of the white rubber farmers and cultural destruction wrought by racist missionaries. It’s a hypnotic film, alternately beautiful and horrifying.

Read more: 6 Great Indigenous Movies, by James Spillane, October 10, 2016, City Pages, Arts & Leisure

Charlie's Country

David Gulpilil—co-star of Walkabout and The Last Wave, de rigueur cast member in arty and ambitious movies about the Australian landscape—has one of the most independent screen presences in all of moviedom. Moving with natural confidence, the wiry Aboriginal dancer-turned-actor never gives the impression that he is playing for an audience; instead, it’s up to the camera to figure out what’s going on. He has the kind of arcing guffaw that always makes it sound like he is laughing only to himself.

This air of independence gets put to superb use in Charlie’s Country, the new film from Rolf De Heer, who previously collaborated with Gulpilil on The Tracker and Ten Canoes. Gulpilil, who co-wrote the script with the director, stars as Charlie, a rascally, sixtysomething resident of an Aboriginal reserve in Australia’s Northern Territory.

Read more: Showcase for Aboriginal Actor David Gulpilil by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, June 4, 2016, AV Club