PRÉSENCE AUTOCHTONE
Festival highlights
Indigenous culture will be shared in many forms at the 27th Présence autochtone, a.k.a. the Montreal First Peoples Festival, which began Wednesday and runs through Aug. 9.
The event’s cinema component features a sneak preview of the Indigenous rock documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, directed by Montrealers Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana.
The movie premièred at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the world cinema documentary section’s special jury award for masterful storytelling. It opened in theatres in Toronto and New York last week but will only arrive on Montreal screens this fall. It plays Wednesday, Aug. 9 at 9 p.m. at Cinéma du Parc.
Filmmaker François Girard (Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, The Red Violin) and Indigenous collaborators on his upcoming feature, Hochelaga, terre des âmes, will give a talk about the project Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at Concordia’s Alumni Auditorium, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W. The film tells a 750-yearspanning story of the land on which Montreal is built.
Other highlights of the featurefilm programming include:
Ashley Duong ’s A Time to Swim (Saturday, 5 p.m., in English, French and Kelabit with French subtitles, Cinéma du Parc), following Mutang Urud, a Montreal-based former activist who returns to his native Malaysia and gets caught up in the fight against deforestation.
Rachel Perkins’s Redfern Now: Promise Me (Saturday, 9 p.m., Cinéma du Parc), about an Australian Indigenous woman who is the victim of rape.
Anne Makepeace’s Tribal Justice (Friday, 7 p.m., Cinéma du Parc), about two female judges in California’s Indigenous judicial system, which focuses on healing and reparation.
Mark Kenneth Woods and Michael Yerxa’s Two Soft Things, Two Hard Things (Tuesday, 7 p.m., Cinéma du Parc), looking at LGBTQ issues in Nunavik.
Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s pro-sealing documentary, Angry Inuk, screens for free Monday at 9 p.m. at Place de la Paix (on St-Laurent Boulevard, just north of René-Lévesque Boulevard). Zacharias Kunuk’s Inuit western, Searchers (Maliglutit), plays Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. at Concordia’s J.A. de Sève Cinema. Both directors are up for the festival’s APTN award, along with Saskatchewan’s Janine Windolph, whose The Land of Rock and Gold (Thursday, 9 p.m., Cinéma du Parc) tells the story of a Cree woman who takes flight with her young son after her husband disappears while hunting, and Caroline Monnet, selected by the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinéfondation for the development of her feature Bootlegger.
A series of Inuit films will be shown for free from Thursday to Saturday at 8:45 p.m. outside Concordia’s FOFA Gallery, just north of Ste-Catherine St., between Guy and Mackay Sts.
Place des Festivals will be transformed into an Indigenous fairground from Thursday to Sunday, with Indigenous food tastings, art installations, activities and concerts, from midday to late evening.
Saturday’s programming includes music and street performances from 12:30 p.m., a Nuestroamericana Friendship Parade starting at 3 p.m. and a
big show at 8:30 p.m. with performances by Hua Li and Fabrice Koffy, Pierre Kwenders and Jacques Jacobus (of Radio Radio), Loco Locass and Shault, Queen Ka and Nomadic Massive.
A series of master classes will be given at Espace Culturel Ashukan, 431 Place Jacques-Cartier, including Mohawk Girls director Tracy Deer on directing inexperienced actors, Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.; screenwriter and director Ernie Webb (Reel Injun, Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World) on forging one’s path as an Aboriginal in TV and cinema, Tuesday at 2:30 p.m.; and filmmaker Chloé Leriche (Avant les rues) on making a film in an Indigenous language, Wednesday at 2:30 p.m.