Directed By: Alanis Obomsawin
1993 | 119 min
Canada

Saturday, November 12: 1:00 pm

Linder Theater
Filmmaker in person

Alanis Obomsawin, a Native American of the Abenaki nation raised in Quebec, began her career as a singer in the folk clubs of New York City, influenced by the aboriginal songs learned as a child. Invited by National Film Board of Canada to make a film on native culture, Obomsawin directed Christmas at Moose Factory (1967), which became the first of 30-plus documentaries she has directed about First Nations people. In the summer of 1990, when the Mohawks outside Montreal protested a neighboring town's efforts to extend a nine-hole golf course into their sacred piney woods and a 78-day siege ensued, Obomsawin documented the entire struggle from the inside. As riveting as it is disturbing, Kanehsatake not only offers a history lesson in the centuries-long land swindle perpetrated by whites on the natives but also demonstrates the camera as a tool of resistance.

Part of the series 35th Anniversary Retrospective Series