Backroads premieres at Aboriginal film festival

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Imagine if you will, a time and a place where you \can sit back and watch close to 40 films in three days and eat tons of popcorn and bannock with an audience made up of your friends, colleagues, and cousins. Well, that's exactly what IMAGeNATION, the 3rd annual Aboriginal Film Festival was all about.

The festival took place in Vancouver, Nov. 3 to 5 and is organized yearly by IMAG- the Indigenous Media Arts Group, a collective of filmmakers and media artists. In addition to the Vancouver festival, IMAG also does a traveling festival and offers training opportunities and grants to emerging artists.

This year's festival was a visual feast of short experimental films, student works, children's programming, and documentaries by award-winning directors Barb Crammer and Alanis Obamsawin. The festival also included a panel discussion on Aboriginal people and the media, and the National Aboriginal Over-Achievement Awards--a comedy cabaret.

The evening programs, "Reel Warriors" and "Indian Girls Kick Ass" screened the feature drama Johnny Greyeyes, directed by Jorge Manzano, Tushka, directed by Ian Skorodin, and Backroads, written and directed by Shirley Cheechoo, who was in attendance to answer questions and speak about the making of her first feature film.

Backroads is set in the 1970s on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, and tells the story of four sisters struggling for justice and their connection with an aspect of their culture--the Bearwalker.

"I wanted to make a film about Native women, and I called it Backroads because everything happens in the back roads of our reserves" said Cheechoo.

Cheechoo began working on this film in 1997 when she attended the screenwriter's workshop at the Sundance Institute.

"I never dreamt of being a film-maker before. But it just landed in my lap and I fell in love with the whole process."

The hardest part of making a move, she said, is finding the money Cheechoo was disappointed to find that she couldn't get the support she needed in Canada, so she crossed the border where she managed to secure a tiny budget of $500,000 US for the production.

Ask anyone in the industry and you will find that it's tough to make full-length feature film for a half-million dollars. This means that a lot of the services are performed in kinds, and it means doing a lot of scenes in one take because there is simply not enough time, money or film to shoot as much as you'd like.

"Some days we'd just have to stop shooting when we would run out of film because you're only allotted so much film per day. So everything has to be right on the first time or otherwise you have to start deciding what scene or shot to take out later."

As if her job as a director wasn't challenging enough, Cheechoo also starred in her film opposite lead Renae Morrisear.

"Everybody in the beginning told me that I would be causing a lot of problems for myself because I was wearing so many hats. But when we started shooting I was thinking to myself, 'wait a minute, aren't there supposed to be some problems now?' Because there wasn't, so I just went back to the way I always work, always wearing so many hats."

Adding to her challenges of multi-tasking and working under financial constraints was the challenge of working with non-Native producers and mentors who she said didn't know anything about the culture. She said she learned the art of compromise when it came to artistic controls of her film.

"(The producers) put in a lot of money so they have a lot to say. So you have to compromise with them and sometimes you lose."

IMAG's philosophy is one of "cultural autonomy in production" and the mandate of the festival is "to present independent media from an Aboriginal perspective to a broad audience win Vancouver." Nobody will ever be able to tell an Indian story like Indian people. We're just starting to tell our stories. We're on the cusp of the birth of an industry and it's really exciting." Said Dana Claxton, who coordinates the estival along with Cleo Reece.

Claxton said in the first year of the festival, 60 per cent of the work was non-independent, meaning that a lot of the work was co-0produced with outside people or organizations such as the National Film Board. This eyar the festival screened only the one non-independent film, which Claxton said is a sure sign that having venues such as the festival will only stimulate more work.

Although disappointed about not getting financing for her work at home, Cheechoo said it'll be much easier in the future.

"They say that often you have to make it outside of your community, or outside of your country before people from home see that you can do something. I'm hoping this film will turn a lot of people's heads, and that it will make it easier for people tool."