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I thought SCHINDLERS LIST would be the most profoundly disturbing film I would ever see. I was wrong. I will not discuss production, techniques, etc. here, except to say the music, the lighting, composition and acting were spiritual (and I do not use that word lightly nor often). US treatment of Native peoples informed Hitler and served as template for treatment of Aboriginals in Australia, Hawaii, Latin America, Africa, the entire planet. I live in New Mexico. I see the effects on Sam Franklins, nearly every day. Kevin Wilmott, director, is listed in Wiki as a Black man and Kansas native; his sensitivity to the subject seems as blood in his veins. I followed the Santa Fe trail, from Albuquerque, through Lawrence, KS. The story of this film was completely invisible to me. I know about boarding schools, but this portrayal was more poignant than RABBIT PROOF FENCE, a profound film. The asylum (which was anything but) is a chilling testament to the pathologizing of free people, which continues today with chemical, instead of iron, restraints. Forced sterilization got mention, which is rare. Native collaboration with US genocide, a tricky discussion, is here. I kept seeing the thousands of silenced stories like this one that need to be told about Native peoples. The film is clear eyed, unsentimental, without polemic or magical thinking. It is nearly documentary in storytelling. The Jews have a saying about the Holocaust: Never Again. We need a filmography, a literature and schools of all art forms that record, with such care and honesty, Manifest Destiny on the North American continent: historically, and contemporarily. The metaphor of the vampire as European invasion is honest; the church as the Castle Dracula was heart breaking.
I thought SCHINDLERS LIST would be the most profoundly disturbing film I would ever see. I was wrong. I will not discuss production, techniques, etc. here, except to say the music, the lighting, composition and acting were spiritual (and I do not use that word lightly nor often). US treatment of Native peoples informed Hitler and served as template for treatment of Aboriginals in Australia, Hawaii, Latin America, Africa, the entire planet. I live in New Mexico. I see the effects on Sam Franklins, nearly every day. Kevin Wilmott, director, is listed in Wiki as a Black man and Kansas native; his sensitivity to the subject seems as blood in his veins. I followed the Santa Fe trail, from Albuquerque, through Lawrence, KS. The story of this film was completely invisible to me. I know about boarding schools, but this portrayal was more poignant than RABBIT PROOF FENCE, a profound film. The asylum (which was anything but) is a chilling testament to the pathologizing of free people, which continues today with chemical, instead of iron, restraints. Forced sterilization got mention, which is rare. Native collaboration with US genocide, a tricky discussion, is here. I kept seeing the thousands of silenced stories like this one that need to be told about Native peoples. The film is clear eyed, unsentimental, without polemic or magical thinking. It is nearly documentary in storytelling. The Jews have a saying about the Holocaust: Never Again. We need a filmography, a literature and schools of all art forms that record, with such care and honesty, Manifest Destiny on the North American continent: historically, and contemporarily. The metaphor of the vampire as European invasion is honest; the church as the Castle Dracula was heart breaking.
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