The Indigenous Film and Arts Festival in Denver is largely a one-woman show, put on by Jeanne Rubin. Every year, the festival finds movies that take you into worlds that simply do not show up in the multiplex. The people and places in the films in this festival are every bit as interesting, meaningful and touching as are those who dominate our commercial theaters.
Ixcanul, English title Volcano, by Jayro Bustamente has won a ton of awards from major festivals all over the world. The movie takes place in Guatemala, in the hilly country surrounding a volcano that makes plenty of noise but doesn’t erupt. There’s a family with something of a farm, a few pigs and chickens. You don’t see much of the father who works at a coffee plantation that also owns the land. Mostly, Ixcanul watches the women – the daughter and mother – in stunning close-up portraits, constantly working. They care for the animals and the fields while the mother also cares for the daughter. She’s preparing her for marriage, hopefully to a young widower who assists the plantation’s boss.
It’s a beautiful film, but a doomed sense of indigenous life pervades the story. The film sees no way for a Mayan family in Guatemala to survive in the end. Their lives are fragile, and indigenous ways fail over and over again. Potions and chanting do not rid the land of snakes, just as the same rituals and substances cannot cause the daughter, who gets pregnant with the wrong guy, to abort the coming child. Ixcanul was released in 2015, so the possibility of emigrating to the United States was still an irresistible lure to young men in these Mayan hills. The plantation owners can also kick the family off this bit of land any time they please. And when the parents and a friend with a truck rush the snake-bit daughter to a hospital in the city, the family that speaks only Mayan cannot understand what is going on in this Spanish-speaking world.
The new film by Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk is called Maliglutit, which in Inuktitut means Searchers. It’s Kunuk’s response to John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece The Searchers, and, of course, puts a new spin on the story of an abduction. Ford’s film is driven by the hatred of a white man for native Americans, which Kunuk turns into something like a feud between families after one group of four men kidnaps two women.
In visual terms, Maliglutit is a haunting, desolate film that gets to a sensibility beyond language. The snow and ice reach out to what feels like infinity, matched by an immense light blue sky. The landscape dwarfs the few people, who look like tiny dots in their furry brown parkas. That’s what Ford did in The Searchers – he made the stupidities of the people miniscule compared to the magnificence of the natural beauty of the Monument Valley desert.
One of the human struggles in Maliglutit is simply to move. There’s no galloping on horseback here. Just walking on the snow takes tremendous effort. The sheer bulk of their clothing bogs them down. Dog sleds glide easily for only short distances before a person has to get off and run alongside. One of the kidnappers ties up one of the women and drags her across the snow. She’s enraged but not injured as she slides, but the effort leaves him exhausted – as it should.
Maliglutit is a magnificent, entrancing film. In story it may seem disjointed or abrupt to non-Inuit eyes, but the visual image has tremendous power and clarity. More than anything, it’s the sense of loneliness that overwhelms. The world is incomprehensibly big – and there are few people in it. That perspective doesn’t often show itself in the movies we’re used to seeing, and it’s a major reason the Indigenous Film and Arts Festival exists.
The annual Indigenous Film and Arts Festival opens next Wednesday in Denver and runs through Oct. 9. All events are free, but a donation is advised. More information: http://iiirm.org/
