Movies: Indigenous

An Indigenous teenage boy fights through distorting realities as a family secret unravels....

CREE CODE TALKER reveals the role of Canadian Cree code talker Charles 'Checker' Tomkins during the Second World War. Digging deep into the US archives it depicts the true story of Charles' involvement with the US Air Force and the development of the...

As an outbreak of leprosy engulfs 19th-century colonial Hawai'i, a small group of infected Native Hawaiians resist government-mandated exile, taking a courageous stand against the provisional government. Inspired by real-life events....

Mani, a master’s student, returns to the reserve in northern Quebec where she grew up. Her painful past resurfaces. Resolved to reintegrate into the community, she gets involved in the debate around a referendum on allowing the free sale of alcohol o...

In 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning, Gazala purchased land in western Ohio, on which sits a disused school building. This site allowed her to explore her complex relationship with “the land.” As the daughter of displaced indigenous Palestinia...

At twenty-six, Noel Starblanket was one of the youngest Indigenous chiefs in North America--twice elected chief of the Starblanket Reserve, and also elected vice-president of all-Saskatchewan Indigenous organization. His great-grandfather's advice wa...

Western culture treats mental disorders primarily through biomedical psychiatry, but filmmakers Phil Borges and Kevin Tomlinson reveal a growing movement of professionals and survivors who are forging alternative treatments that focus on recovery and...

Matimekush is landlocked in the former mining town of Schefferville, 700 km north of Sept-Îles. It was founded in the 1950s, when the Canadian government and Iron Or forced the Innu to settle down. In Canada’s Far North, there is a dire labour shorta...

The Mapuche tribe asks their Gods for help in difficult situations, including illness and drought. When the Spanish conquerers on their horses invade their country, the indigenous people think that they are aliens. The Spaniards capture and enslave m...

A personal, scientific, mystical exploration of Amazonian curanderismo, focus on Ayahuasca and Master Plants, their healing and visionary properties and risks, along with the Shipibo people and their songs....

Anishinaabe author Drew Hayden Taylor investigates how — and why — Indigenous identity, culture and art are being appropriated by those who are not First Nations....

In this searing documentary, Indigenous people share heartbreaking stories that reveal the injustices inflicted by the Canadian child welfare system....

A weathered tribal cop and his new trainee must find a ruthless fugitive, whose return to their rural Indigenous reservation has exposed its darkest secrets and could ignite a violent gang war....

Two friends, both Indigenous fishermen, are driven to desperation by a dying sea. Their friendship begins to fracture as they take very different paths to provide for their struggling families....

An experimental look at the origin of the death myth of the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, following two people as they navigate their own relationships to the spirit world and a place in between life and death....

In the form of a poetic love letter to its nation, this short film reveals a strong community and the anchoring of the new generation in this rich culture....

They were forced to assimilate into white society: children ripped away from their families, depriving them of their culture and erasing their identities. Can reconciliation help heal the scars from childhoods lost? "Dawnland" is the untold story of ...

On a frozen remote highway in the Canadian North, an Indigenous woman and her dog are hunted by a stranger in a semi truck....

This feature-length documentary chronicles the Sundance ceremony brought to Eastern Canada by William Nevin of the Elsipogtog First Nation of the Mi'kmaq. Nevin learned from Elder Keith Chiefmoon of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Alberta. Under the Jul...

This film is an intimate portrayal of pioneering filmmaker Merata Mita told through the eyes of her children. Using hours of archive footage, some never before seen, her youngest child and director Hepi Mita discovers the filmmaker he never knew and ...