Movies: Indigenous

This film explores the traditional crafts of Native American tribes, specifically the Hopi, Navajo, and Iroquois. It highlights the craftsmanship of Hopi basket weaving and pottery, showcasing their techniques and cultural significance. The Navajo's ...

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...

The ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest are home to giant trees and many secrets, which science is just beginning to understand. But these forests are at risk of disappearing. In British Columbia on First Nation territory, a small band of forest...

A Chippewa prophecy foretells a time called the 7th Fire when lost traditions will be recovered. Native American filmmaker Sandra Sunrising Osawa examines how the Chippewa Indians of Northern Wisconsin have struggled to restore the centuries-old trad...

A documentary road movie. Traveling across his homeland, the filmmaker explores what Yakut cinema is, and what it means to the Sakha people and to himself....

In this layered short film, filmmaker Janine Windolph takes her young sons fishing with their kokum (grandmother), a residential school survivor who retains a deep knowledge and memory of the land. The act of reconnecting with their homeland is a cul...

In this era of "reconciliation", Indigenous land is still being taken at gunpoint. INVASION is a new film about the Unist'ot'en Camp, Gidimt'en checkpoint, and the Wet'suwet'en Nation standing up to the Canadian government and corporations who contin...

This short documentary follows three Indigenous women as they practice ancestral forms of worship: drumming, singing, and using sweetgrass. These ancient spiritual traditions may at first seem at odds with urban life, but to Indigenous people in Cana...

From the remote Australian desert to the opulence of Buckingham Palace - Namatjira Project is the iconic story of the Namatjira family, tracing their quest for justice....

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 ...

Sammy Gadbois uses candid moments to question his purpose on earth....

Documentary about "The Coolbaroo Club",  which was the only Aboriginal-run dance club in a city which practiced unofficial apartheid. During its lifetime, the Club attracted Black musicians and celebrities from all over Australia and occasionally fro...

"Mother Tongue" chronicles the first time a documentary film about Guatemalan genocide in Guatemala was translated and dubbed into Maya-Ixil—5.5% of whom were killed during the armed conflict in the 1980s. Told from the perspective of Matilde Terraza...

On Canada's Pacific coast this film finds a young Haida artist, Robert Davidson, shaping miniature totems from argillite, a jet-like stone. The film follows the artist to the island where he finds the stone, and then shows how he carves it in the man...

This very short film from the Canada Vignettes series documents the annual pilgrimage that members of Saskatchewan’s Métis Catholic community make to St. Laurent, a village in the Duck Lake area that became the Métis nation’s spiritual centre at the ...

...

A short film highlighting the epidemic of missing indigenous men and women who have gone missing in Bighorn County, Montana. It features several victims' stories and interviews with their families and indigenous activists who are pushing for their c...

In a remote Peruvian city, lives Honorata Vilca, an illiterate woman of Quechua descent who sells candies more than 20 years ago, with the rain will cry to the sky itself....

Navajo Film Themselves is a series of seven short documentaries: Intrepid Shadows (1966), The Navajo Silversmith (1966), A Navajo Weaver (1966), Old Antelope Lake (1966), Second Weaver (1966), The Shallow Well Project (1966), and The Spirit of the Na...

The Living Stone is a 1958 Canadian short documentary film directed by John Feeney about Inuit art. It shows the inspiration behind Inuit sculpture. The Inuit approach to the work is to release the image the artist sees imprisoned in the rough stone....