Film festival included '20 Days in Mariupol'

The eleventh annual Friday Harbor Film Festival showed 25 feature and 14 short documentary films last week, Oct. 27-29. The volunteer staff and festival volunteers once again offered a well organized and smooth running experience, with screenings at three venues throughout the weekend.

A journalist attending a film festival has an obligation to report on films that interest the community and a responsibility to cover films that interest him. For that I viewed “20 Days in Mariupol,” an AP – FRONTLINE/PBS film of journalists providing video reports to the outside world at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That war suddenly seems ancient and distance but the devastation, total destruction, death, personal pain and ruining of the social fabric is as immediate as today’s news coming out or of Gaza, if facts are allowed out. Good films connect people to their current world.

Director Mstyslav Chernov and his crew are Ukrainian Associated Press reporters at the beginning of Russia’s invasion. Like all journalism, the film was edited, but it unfolds as a day-by-day, sometimes moment-by-moment account, from shelling in the distance at first till the last couple of days when the Ukrainian military takes the initiative to escort the AP team out of the country through the Red Cross negotiated safe corridor. The government recognized that journalists getting the news to the outside world was as critically important as firing weapons.

Viewers see dramatic footage as the reporters films show up days later on TV news in countries around the world, including the bombing of a maternity hospital and the aftermath: a pregnant woman dies, as does her unborn baby. The footage directly refuted Russian misinformation.

Well before Day 20 the city looks like a hurricane ripped through it, except the journalists have reported missiles striking apartment complexes and hospitals and buildings in flames.

Buffy Sainte-Marie in the news

Film festivals offer filmmaker question and answer sessions and audience voting for best-of-show awards. That live dynamic was best seen when Kyle Irving, an executive producer of “Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On,” was asked about a just released Canadian documentary’s findings that Sainte-Marie was not Indigenous. Irving called her “one of the most highly regarded Indigenous activists in North American history,” which his 90-minute film amply documented. Archival footage emphasizes her decades of singing and activism, going back to 1960s New York City folk singing days and her early antiwar hit, “Universal Soldier.” There are numerous TV interviews and news footage of her at the 197. occupation at Wounded Knee.

The film amply documents, as it summarizes, that “Sainte-Marie changed perceptions of Indigenous people in music, film, and television.” It shows that before playing a lead role in a 1968 episode of “The Virginian,” she famously demanded that all Indigenous roles be played by Indigenous peoples. During her five-years on Sesame Street, she helped create segments based on her experiences as an Indigenous woman in North America.

The film is from Eagle Vision, an Indigenous Canadian studio.

The Salmon People

“Covenant of the Salmon People” and the shorter “Call of the Orcas,” “Into the Stillaguamish” and “Our Sacred Obligation” emphasized that tribes of the Salmon People, as cultures throughout the Pacific Northwest name themselves, are dependent on salmon for their existential identity. As a Stillaguamish tribal member and fisheries biologist said, she was 30 years old and had never fished for salmon with her grandparents. “A lot of tribal members struggle with an identity crisis,” she said, and an entire generation has lost the connection to their historic way of life.

Every film showed iconic black and white photographs and film of historic abundant native fishing. “Covenant” follows the Nez Perce in Idaho. Dams on the Columbia and Snake river systems have broken their “ancient covenant with salmon.” Tribal members come back from fishing on the Columbia with a handful of salmon to distribute a token amount among their members.

But salmon as a food source is only a small part of the basis of their civilization historically. The film shows that salmon have been the cornerstone of their creation story and woven into their culture. As with every salmon-focused film, rituals and community interaction with children and elders are central, but with so few salmon the fabric is strained.

All our western rivers run with salmon, and the documentaries filmed by and of the Indigenous people show the similarity and consistency of those who have lived with salmon since time immemorial from the Elwa River on the Olympic peninsula to the Snake River on the Washington Idaho border and the Columbia River to California’s Klamath River.

“Our Sacred Obligation” documents the Yurok Tribe’s progress toward having a Klamath River dam taken down. It shows women in several tribes from California to Washington coming together to share their strategies and progress in their home watersheds.

It is exactly the same with “A Cedar Is Life,” woven, literally, into every part of West Coast First Nations culture. The filmmakers speak with elders, artists, educators and go into schools and forest to show the ongoing relationship between the people and “The Tree of Life,” and the threats to its continued existence.

Salmon and cedar, the disruption to native communities over the last 175-plus years have broken the links of generations with the loss of their connection to their historic way of life.