Posts Tagged ‘documentary’

24
Feb

Documentary follows filming of Welch’s ‘Winter in the Blood’

   Posted by: admin    in Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, Native actors, Native farmers, Native films, Native identity

Chaske Spencer, left, playing Virgil First Raise, along with Michael Spears, center, and Gary Farmer, right, pitch hay on the set of "Winter in the Blood" in August 2011. (Courtesy of DONNIE SEXTON/Montana Office of Tourism)


Missoulian reporter Vince Devlin takes us to the Hi-line of Montana where the film “Winter in the Blood” was made using Native actors and extras. The story follows the trials of Virgil First Raise (Chaske Spencer) on the Fort Belknap Reservation.

A sneak peek of the film will be held in Missoula, MT., this weekend. Visionary Insight: Behind the Scenes of the Film ‘Winter in the Blood’” screens Saturday at 5:15 p.m. at the Wilma Theatre, a part of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival

Here’s Devlin’s story on the making of the film:

    On a bitter cold January night in 2007, screenwriter-actor Ken White was having trouble sleeping.

    White was a guest at the Montana ranch home of Annick Smith, mother of his filmmaker friends, twins Andrew and Alex Smith. He pulled a book off a shelf to read hoping only that it would lure his eyelids toward half-mast.

    Several hours later White put down “Winter in the Blood” by James Welch. He’d stayed up all night to finish the book, and was still wide awake.

    “He called us that morning,” Alex says, “and said, ‘Why aren’t you making this book into a movie?’ It was a good question. Why aren’t we?”

    The twins had known Welch for as long as they could remember. He was a long-time family friend from before they’d even been born.
    He’d even met his wife Lois at a dinner party at their house.
    “Winter in the Blood,” the story of a troubled and aimless young man on Montana’s Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, was Welch’s first novel and started his transition from poet to author.

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23
Feb

APTN developing Mohawk Girls TV show

   Posted by: admin    in aboriginal, Canada, Mohawk, Native films, Native humor, Native youth

The producer and director of an acclaimed documentary about three teenage Mohawk girls growing up on a reserve in Canada is taking the concept to the next level.

Candadian blog TV, EH? posted a press release from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network announcing that Tracey Deer will executive produce a new television show about “four sexy twenty-somethings trying to figure out what it means to be a modern day Mohawk woman.”

    The pilot for Mohawk Girls, shot in 2010, was selected during the 2010 Cannes Film Festival to be a finalist in the first-ever International Pilots Competition at the Banff World Television Festival. It is the second acclaimed comedy from Rezolution Pictures, which won the 2008 CFTPA Indie Award for Best Comedy Series for Moose TV, starring Adam Beach, Nathaniel Arcand, Jennifer Podemski, and directed by Tim Southam.

    Mohawk Girls was inspired by Tracey Deer’s 2005 feature-length documentary of the same name, about the trials and tribulations of three teenage girls growing up on the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake. This Rezolution Pictures/NFB co-produced film received the Alanis Obomsawin Best Documentary Award at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. Honours for Tracey Deer also include the Gemini Award for best writing and the Canada Award for her 2008 Rezolution Pictures/NFB documentary Club Native.

No word on when the project will begin shooting for the first season, but the release did mention that the cast has been selected.

The website Women Make Movies has more about the original Mohawk Girl documentary.

Jenna Cederberg

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