W8ban: Retrouver nos voix

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 July sky, participants in the Sundance ceremony go four days without food or water. Then they will pierce the flesh of their chests in an offering to the Creator. This event marks a transmission of culture and a link to the warrior traditions of the past.

Haunted by the past, siblings Mise’l and Antle are destined to reunite and join forces against a dark spirit that emerges from their shared childhood. Once inseparable, their fractured relationship set by years of silence and a violent episode rooted in homophobia, is tested as they must return to Sk+te’kmujue’kati (the Place of Ghosts) a forest steeped in ancestral memory where time bends. What initiates from trauma soon transforms into an odyssey of healing, as Mise’l and Antle confront their caretaker’s cruelty, the weight of family secrets, and their own deepest fears. Visually stunning and emotionally raw, this extraordinary tale explores how love, even when repressed, can become the fiercest weapon against hate.

Gil Cardinal searches for his natural family and an understanding of the circumstances that led to his becoming a foster child. An important figure in the history of Canadian Indigenous filmmaking, Gil Cardinal was born to a Métis mother but raised by a non-Indigenous foster family, and with this auto-biographical documentary he charts his efforts to find his biological mother and to understand why he was removed from her. Considered a milestone in documentary cinema, it addressed the country’s internal colonialism in a profoundly personal manner, winning a Special Jury Prize at Banff and multiple international awards.

INAATE/SE/ re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAATE/SE/ transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community within Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.

A young half-breed boy, the son of a hockey player and an Indian woman, is adopted by a Jewish shopkeeper, but finds himself torn between the different cultures with which he comes into contact.

A documentary on the road that tracks the journey by Georgina, an elderly transgender woman forced to cross the sandy peninsula Guajira, on foot, to obtain the thing she has desired for almost half a century: a document that will hand her the right to be what she has always felt she was, and will allow her, at long last, to vote.

Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life.

Yellowtail is the story of a young Native American cowboy searching for meaning as his chaotic lifestyle begins to wear on him both physically and mentally. To find his purpose the young man has to reflect on his upbringing as a native to become the spiritually connect man he was meant to be.

During the marijuana bonanza, a violent decade that saw the origins of drug trafficking in Colombia, Rapayet and his indigenous family get involved in a war to control the business that ends up destroying their lives and their culture.

In a dark, ambiguous environment, minuscule particles drift slowly before the lens. The image focuses to reveal spruce trees and tall pines, while Innu voices tell us the story of this territory, this flooded forest. Muffled percussive sounds gradually become louder, suggesting the presence of a hydroelectric dam. The submerged trees gradually transform into firebrands as whispers bring back the stories of this forest.

A prehistoric epic that follows a young mammoth hunter's journey through uncharted territory to secure the future of his tribe.

Documents the conflicts and tensions that arise between highland migrants and Mosetenes, members of an indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon. It focuses particularly on a system of debt peonage known locally as ‘habilito’. This system is used throughout the Bolivian lowlands, and much of the rest of the Amazon basin, to secure labor in remote areas.

A documentary on the war between the Guatemalan military and the Mayan population, with first hand accounts by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú.

Summoned from an ashram in Tibet, Ace finds himself on a perilous journey into the jungles of Africa to find Shikaka, the missing sacred animal of the friendly Wachati tribe. He must accomplish this before the wedding of the Wachati's Princess to the prince of the warrior Wachootoos. If Ace fails, the result will be a vicious tribal war.

1492: Conquest of Paradise depicts Christopher Columbus’ discovery of The New World and his effect on the indigenous people.

Heta ysyryre gueteri jahasata. Translating from guaraní: Many ways to go! Olga inhabits this world. Just like every day, Olga gets up to have coffee and live another day of small conflicts and family omissions. But this may not be a Saturday like any other, and starting from somewhat disturbing encounters, we will accompany Olga in her being in the world.

Actor Rawiri Paratene was 16 years old when he joined Māori activist group Ngā Tamatoa (Young Warriors) in the early 1970s. "Those years helped shape the rest of my life," says Paratene in this 2012 Māori TV documentary, directed by Kim Webby. The programme is richly woven with news archive from the 1970s, showing protests about land rights and the Treaty of Waitangi, and a campaign for te reo to be taught in schools. Several ex Ngā Tamatoa members — including Hone Harawira, Tame Iti and Larry Parr— are interviewed by Paratene, who also presents the documentary.

Noemí, an Ayuukjä'äy woman reflects on the loss of her native tongue with a voice that blends into day to day life in Cerro Costoche community located in the Mixe mountain rage of Oaxaca.

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

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.