Movies: Indigenous

This beautiful short film captures the quiet dignity of a day in the life of a Northern trapper, without use of any dialogue....

Combining archival photos with new and found footage, this short film presents a personal, impressionistic rendering of what it's like growing up Mi'kmaq in Newfoundland, while living in a culture of denial. Vistas is a series of 13 short films on n...

The creation of the Xingu Indigenous Park is reassessed by indigenous peoples and anthropologists. Almost 50 years after the initiative, which had the decisive participation of the indigenist brothers Cláudio and Orlando Villas-Bôas, the older indige...

Men and women of the !Kung people in Ojokhoe, Namibia perform healing dances by firelight. First we see men perform the giraffe dance, and then women perform the !gwa dance....

A stop-motion documentary that describes the artificial mummification (black and red mummies) of the Chinchorro culture, a pre-hispanic society of fishermen and hunter-gatherers who practiced funeral rites with sophisticated techniques for body prese...

Ginger Côté uses the words of Heather Archibald, an activist who grew up in foster care and who died, to honor the memory of the young woman and also to advocate for a change in policies towards First Nations....

Examines the 1879 court case of Standing Bear vs. Crook and the struggle for basic Native American rights....

A love story set against the backdrop of the climate crisis and the opioid epidemic, Echo and Wild are two urban Indigenous land defenders. On the one-year anniversary of their arrest on the front lines, a death in their community opens old wounds bu...

At the end of the world, only Indigenous people can survive the toxic landscape so the white fellas steal ‘mud children’ to experiment on in the hopes of finding a cure. One such mud child, Aiden now returns to his ancestral lands, where the mermaids...

Shoal Lake 40 women talk about their struggles, and those of their parents and grandparents, in trying to raise their families in a hazardous state of enforced isolation. Everyone in the community has a harrowing story of a loved one falling through ...

Promised Land is a social justice documentary that follows two tribes in the Pacific Northwest: the Duwamish and the Chinook, as they fight for the restoration of treaty rights they've long been denied. In following their story, the film examines a l...

Steeped in the long oral tradition of Waorani storytelling, Gange Yeti shares her own coming-of-age story as a young Waorani woman living deep within the Amazon rainforest. Following Gange and her community for over 11 years, the film captures her tr...

Two young men spend an ordinary weekend together as Jehovah's Witnesses in the historic industry town of Trail, British Columbia. They eat junk food, play video games, watch movies, drink energy drinks, go out in the Ministry, then go their separate ...

Marina is a girl who discovers the legends and traditions of her ancestors on a magical journey through the nature that surrounds her and takes her to Shark Island. Short film spoken in the Comcáac language....

This short documentary presents the empowering story of Rodney "Geeyo" Poucette's struggle against prejudice in the Indigenous community as a two-spirited person....

After moving to a new house, the hero meets an unknown girl-neighbor and immediately becomes a witness of inexplicable events. Trying to understand the mystical events, the hero enters into a confrontation with the girl's father, who keeps a shocking...

Filmmaker Mary Galloway's feature documentary looks at the origins and continued impact of the famed Cowichan sweater....

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This short documentary serves as a portrait of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, one of Canada's most important painters. We meet him at the Bisley Rifle Range in Surrey, England, where he's literally shooting the Indian Act in a performance piece called "A...