New Asia Cinema

September–December, Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m.
Flavin Family Auditorium, Isenberg School of Management, Free

New Asia Cinema presents: Global Indigenous Visions

2018 curatorial team: Anne Ciecko, Jenna McLauren, Colby Miyose
Contact: ciecko@comm.umass.edu

Global Indigenous Visions is the 14th annual semester-long film festival in partnership with the UMass Asian Arts and Culture Program. This season, we present 12 films from September 12th through December 12th . (Please note: there are no screenings on November 14th or 21st because of holiday schedules). New Asia Cinema screenings are coordinated in conjunction with courses including Comm 296F, Film Festival colloquium. All events are free and open to the public. All screenings start at 7:30 p.m. in Flavin Family Auditoria School of Management(SOM137).

Schedule
September 12: The Sapphires  (dir. Wayne Blair, Australia, 2012, in English, 99 minutes). An all-female
Aboriginal singing group tours Vietnam in the 1960s, in this musical comedy-drama, based on a true story.
 
September 19: The Two Horses of Genghis Khan (dir. Byambasuren Davaa, Mongolia/Germany, 2010, in
Mongolian with English subtitles, 91 minutes). Referencing one of the oldest Mongolian epics, this docudrama
charts the journey of a singer to bring a musical instrument back to her homeland and search for the lost
verses of a folksong.
 
September 26: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen  (dir. Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Kohn,
Canada/Denmark, 2006, in Inuktitut, Danish, and English, with English subtitles, 112 minutes). Set in 1922, this
film explores the cross-cultural encounters of a nomadic Inuit community in the Qikiqtaaluk Region and a group
of Danish explorers, especially the great Inuit shaman, Aua, and Greenlandic/Danish anthropologist, Knud
Rasmussen.
 
October 3: Kumu Hina (dir. Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson, Hawai’I (US)/Fiji, 2014, in English, Hawaiian, and
Tongan with English subtitles, 77 minutes). This powerful documentary presents a portrait of Hinaleimoana
Wong Kalu, an inspiring and iconic Native Hawaiian teacher, a proud transgender woman, cultural practitioner,
and community leader.
 
October 10: Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (dir. Wei Te-sheng, Taiwan, 2011, in Seediq, Japanese,
and Taiwanese, with English subtitles, 150 minutes). This historical epic about the Wushe Rebellion in 1930,
an uprising by the Seediq indigenous group against colonial rule in Taiwan, is a record-breaking Taiwanese
blockbuster.

October 17: Ixcanul (dir. Jayro Bustamante, Guatemala/France, 2015, in Kaqchikel & Spanish with English
subtitles, 100 minutes). Ixcanul (Volcano), the first film produced in the Mayan language, Kaqchikel, focuses on
the lives of people who live and work on a coffee plantation in the midst of an active volcano, especially
seventeen year-old María.
 
October 24: Boy (dir. Taika Waititi, New Zealand, 2012, in English and Maori with English subtitles, 88
minutes). Imaginative, touching, and bittersweetly hilarious, Boy centers around a Maori kid in rural New
Zealand in the 1980s with an absentee dad and a Michael Jackson obsession.
 
October 31: Rhymes for Young Ghouls  (dir.Jeff Barnaby, Canada, 2013, in English and Mi’kmaq, 88 minutes)
Set in the 1970s on the Mi’kmaq Red Crow reservation and in a government-enforced residential school,
Rhymes mixes realism, lyricism, supernatural images of the undead, crime thriller grittiness, a strong and
central female character, and a trenchant critique of injustices against indigenous people.

November 7: Sami Blood (dir. Amanda Kernell, Sweden/Denmark/Norway, 2016, in Swedish and Southern
Sami with English subtitles, 109 minutes). Switching between the recent past and 1930s Sweden, Sami Blood
recounts the prejudice encountered in government-enforced boarding schools and internalized throughout
lifetimes, with the story of a rebellious teenage girl taken from her Sami family.
 

November 28: Embrace of the Serpent (El Abrazo de la Serpiente) . (dir. Ciro Guerra, 2015, Multiple
indigenous languages including Cubeo, Huitoto, Ticuna, Wanano, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Catalan, and Latin with
English subtitles. 125 minutes.)  Filmed in the Amazon region of Colombia, Embrace of the Serpent tells the story of a shaman and last survivor of his tribe (played by
indigenous actors Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolivar at different stages of the character’s life), who makes two expeditions to find a sacred
plant, accompanied by, respectively, a German ethnographer and an American botanist, both modeled on historical figures. This acclaimed
film was a co-production of Colombia, Venezuela, and Argentina, was written and directed by Ciro Guerra.

"Charting two parallel journeys deep into the Amazon..., this bifurcated narrative delivers a fairly comprehensive critique of the destruction of
indigenous cultures at the hands of white invaders”-Justin Chang,Variety

"A visually mesmerizing exploration of man, nature and the destructive powers of colonialism -Jordan Mintzer, Hollywood Reporter

December 5:  Rumble: The Indians who Rocked the World.  (dir. Catherine Bainbridge, 2017). RUMBLE focuses on a largely untold history of the Indigenous
influence on popular music. Including footage of iconic figures Charley Patton, Mildred Bailey, Link Wray, Jimi Hendrix, Jesse Ed Davis, BuffySainte-Marie,
Robbie Robertson, Randy Castillo, and Taboo, RUMBLE reveals the ways these ground-breaking Native artists helped shape music
history and popular culture.

December 12 TBA