Aboriginal culture takes centre stage at Reel 2 Real International Film Festival for Youth

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      Aboriginal stories play a prominent role in this year’s Reel 2 Real International Film Festival for Youth—but Pocahontas didn’t make the cut.

      While Hollywood continues to pump out one-dimensional representations of indigenous peoples, this year’s Reel 2 Real, which runs from tomorrow to next Friday (April 9 to 16), includes films from around the globe that offer decidedly different, and more realistic, lessons in aboriginal culture.

      One of them, Tara Mahoney’s “Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope)”, is a short documentary about former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations Phil Fontaine’s trip to Rome to meet with Pope Benedict XVI and discuss the Catholic Church’s dark residential-school legacy. In “Mémí¨re Métisse”, APTN cohost Janelle Wookey uses all kinds of playful tactics to cajole her grandmother into acknowledging her Métis roots. “Mokopuna” tells the story of a young New Zealand girl who befriends a Maori boy at school, a relationship that leads her to explore her own aboriginal ties, if a little reluctantly. And the opening-night feature, The Indian, tells the story of an adopted boy in the Netherlands who uncovers his Incan lineage and along the way discovers the importance of family, whether related by blood or not.


      Watch the trailer for The Secret of Kells.

      “We all have our roots that we’re curious about, and there are some of us who reject those roots and others that embrace them,” Reel 2 Real executive director Venay Felton says by phone. Felton, who worked with the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival before moving to B.C. in 1993 and launching Vancouver’s fest in 1998, says that is relevant to all ages. “But kids have fewer prejudices, whether they’re about someone else’s culture or internalized about their own. So they’re much more open and receptive to new ideas.”

      That same openness is what keeps kids coming back to the festival year after year. According to Felton, many kids feel insulted by mainstream movies that talk down to them or present overly simplified stories; in fact, most of them prefer the films that weren’t made specifically with younger audiences in mind.

      “Kids are sophisticated and they’re looking for great films. They have to be age-appropriate and the content has to appeal to them, but that’s what interests them,” Felton says. “They even enjoy films that are quite challenging, because they’re so unlike what they get to see in theatres.”


      Watch the trailer for School Days With a Pig.

      This year’s festival offerings are also remarkably diverse. The Canadian film Hungry Hills, based on a novel by George Ryga, is a western about two teen outcasts who take drastic, and drastically different, steps to escape the Saskatchewan foothills. Japan’s School Days With a Pig follows a sixth-grade class that adopts a pig and cares for it for a year and along the way gets a very visceral lesson in the link between life and food. And the Oscar-nominated animated feature The Secret of Kells follows a young boy’s adventures in the forest as he strives to complete the legendary Book of Kells and along the way fights marauding Vikings and befriends a fairy who morphs into a wolf. Many directors and actors will also be on hand to take people’s postscreening questions.

      “A lot of what children are exposed to is more light and fluffy material. But they describe these films as more authentic and dealing with issues that are more real to them, like adoption, like eating a pig, like being an outcast,” says Felton, who adds that her favourite part of the festival is watching kids’ reactions to the films.

      “It’s so gratifying when they say, ”˜Where can we get a copy of this?’ and ”˜When can you bring it back?’ They’ll even come up to me years later and say they still think about a film they saw at the festival, and that’s just great to hear.”

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