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News from the Future of Public Media
Whose Identity Is It, Anyway?: National Film Board as Public Media
email discuss Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 30, 2008 at 2:01 PM
What difference does it make to have government funding for public media? Look at Canada, where the National Film Board (NFB) for more than 60 years has produced films that engage publics on national and cultural issues. The NFB shone at the HotDocs documentary film festival, which every April in Toronto showcases the latest Canadian work, as well as international production.
My personal favorite of all the films I saw at HotDocs was an NFB production: Mohawk filmmaker Tracey Deer’s Club Native. Tracey Deer lives in a small Mohawk community where group membership is decided by blood kinship. That wasn’t good news for her sister, who fell in love with a non-Mohawk, and whose children will now not be eligible for membership. That problem threw Tracey Deer into an exploration of the controversial questions around Native identity. She draws a poignant portrait of connection and separation—a daughter of a Native-non-Native union who is disenfranchised in her home town, a former Olympic swimmer and Mohawk activist who wars with her love for a non-Native, and of course Deer’s own sister. Deer makes a powerful case for identity based on cultural identification (language, ritual, community networks) rather than on blood ties. But she doesn’t forget about the passion for preserving the embattled Mohawk nation that drives many of those who fight the cultural definition.
What happened when Tracey Deer showed the film in her own community? “I was scared to screen it, but I wanted people there to see it before it premiered here,” she explained at HotDocs. “Not many people came.” The issue, she thinks, is so explosive that it’s still controversial even to watch a film about it. About 70 people attended each screening, she said, and after the screenings, her requests for comments and questions resulted in absolute silence. “It’s a small community, and you have to live with everybody,” she said. “I understand why people didn’t want to speak out.” However, during informal chat over food and drink, she said, some people in the intercultural-marriage category came up to thank her, and quiet conversations began to bloom. As well, she noted that in a festival screening, a Jewish man married to a non-Jew came up to thank her and say, “I need to show this film to my mother.” It seems that Tracey Deer has begun however tentatively to open up a public conversation that couldn’t get started on its own, both within her community and beyond it.
The National Film Board has also been responsible for two of the other films that have been on my favorites list this year: Up the Yangtze and Triage. Up the Yangtze, which will show in theaters in some cities and on public TV series P.O.V. this summer, tells the remarkable story of explosive Chinese economic development from the deck of a luxury cruise ship on the Yangtze River. (Yung Chang, the film’s director, won a HotDocs $10,000 prize.) As you float past vistas no one will ever see again—they will be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam—you see the cruise ship from the viewpoint of a teen-aged worker, hired out of a family about to be flooded out of the banks of the Yangtze by the dam. The ironies multiply, and never once will you be bombarded with messages. Rather, you’ll be given the humanist, multiply-faceted view of a current issue that is inaccessible by other media.
Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma, another HotDocs selection, similarly picks up a familiar issue by the thorny, human side. Orbinski leads the heroic humanitarian organization Doctors without Borders. But he’s faced with an ugly problem: humanitarian aid agencies have been drawn into world conflicts, and have become pawns in a total-war game. What is the morally defensible thing to do, in Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo? You follow a passionately dedicated man through the moral thicket that is modern humanitarian politics.
The National Film Board is being nibbled to death by ducks, financially; it’s struggling for funding in a neoliberal political climate. But these three films are powerful evidence of something being done right. Central issues— national and cultural identity, globalization, development, humanitarian ethics—are being raised in ways that people can understand and identify with. Storytelling is united with issues to create a common touchpoint for people of diverse opinions and backgrounds to begin a conversation. These films are examples of the best in public media, and deserve public support.
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