© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Denver's Indigenous Film and Arts Festival: Unexpected Films From Unexpected Filmmakers

The festival opens with Alamar, a film from Mexico made in 2009. Alamar won awards all over Latin America, and it was on the festival circuit, including Denver, but it only had one screening here and deserves more. In the story a man from a small island off the coast of Mexico and a woman from Rome fall in love, have a child and then decide to separate – she needs her city and he needs his island, so he takes the little boy to his childhood home for a last visit.

But story is the least of Alamar. The experience of the film is the footage from the time on the magical Banco Chinchorro, which may be one of the most peaceful and lyrical 70 minute stretches in the history of film. The grandfather lives in a house on stilts in a small community on the water. Grandfather, son and grandson go to the nearby reef, where the men catch fish and lobsters. Together, they cook; they swim; under the bright sun, the water looks luxurious, and the three people graceful and completely at home.

Since they all wear bathing suits nearly all of the time, there’s constant skin contact between father and son, and filmed with a close, unhurried camera, you feel the intimacy. Much of the movie is shot on small boats, and the undulation of the water becomes part of the rhythm of the film, like a lullabye. You get used to bobbing with the gentle swells of the Carribean

It’s also an observant camera that shows how an indigenous settlement connects to the larger world. The grandfather has never been anywhere else, but he still has a newish boat, communicates with friends by radio – and, of course has a son and grandson with international lives.

Just this week, for the first time, I saw a film made in the language called Greenlandic, and that in itself is worth the price of admission to the Indigenous Film and Arts Festival. There is surely no other place else within two days’ drive to see such a film.

This particular picture is called Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution. It’s a documentary by a Greenlander, Inuk Silis Høegh, about the rock band Sumé, which was a sensation in Greenland and Denmark from 1973 to 1976, and which actually changed the country. Sumé wrote and performed songs of alienation, displacement, love for the country and its exploitation by Denmark, the colonizer, with the result that in 1979 Greenland was given home rule.

Sumé tells a good story, but even though it’s pretty standard filmmaking, the film is fascinating to watch. It’s full of deliberate contradiction – the houses that people used to live in compared to the apartment blocks many people have to live in now. Western-looking rooms, furniture and dishes; western style clothing. The band looks like any other rock band of its time. These images speak to the extent of Danish influence over people who are part of the Inuit world, and to their assimilation, but there’s the Greenlandic speech and shots that show an independent Greenlandish culture that survives its Western trappings. There’s the dominance of snow and ice in a harsh landscape, settlements clustered along the water, fishing, sled dogs, and portraits of people in non-western clothing posed on the land from the time Sumé was popular.

The music of Sumé also embodies the contradictions. The chords and progressions are typical of mid-70s rock ‘n’ roll, but the lyrics, in Greenlandic, evoke a place that’s geographically and culturally not part of the western world. The translated lyrics say things like “I wake up” or “I’ve been sleeping a long time,” and “They are here to oppress us.” In English, it’s not great poetry, but in Greenlandic they shook things up pretty well. Sumé quite thoroughly undermines your expectations.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
Related Content