Montreal First Peoples Film Festival 2016

100 TIKIs film still

Présence autochtone

Montreal First Peoples Film Festival
26th Edition

CELEBRATING FIRST NATIONS CULTURE
August 3 -10, 2016

Yesterday was the opening night of the Montreal's annual Présence autochtone festival. The festival comprises of several venues, one of which is the film festival.

The festival opened with the film 100 TIKIs (see a still from the film above). It was introduced by the creator of the film Dan Taulapapa McMullin, an artist based in Hudson, New York. He is a native Samoan, born and raised on American Samoa. As he told the audience, one day the American officials arrived on the island and started distributing television boxes to the local schools, including the one where he was a pupil. The TV sets were placed in classrooms as an “Education Tool” but the education proper did not last long, being replaced by Hollywood films. No other people on the island had a television set at the time.

100 TIKIs represents a collage based on mainly decades-old images, most of them created by Hollywood. It shows how ridiculous was the infringement of the Hollywood standards into the native cultural expression and values, and how disruptive. Beneath the rapidly changing imagery, one senses a rising wave of anger for the demeaning of the Pacific Island’s native culture and their ways of life.

100 TIKIs interrogates the colonialism of the Pacific islands' peoples from Hawaii to West Papua, through the examination of tiki kitsch, tourism, militarism, sexism and the subjugation of indigenous peoples and their culture. It reveals a vulgarization process that took place, where common values became mundane, trivial and even inhuman.

Incidentally, and it appears quite unintentionally, the film also exposes in a short clip how Hollywood managed to demean and sexualize a highly intelligent, actually a brilliant woman like Hedy Lamarr, who discovered and patented the cornstone physical principle of Frequency Hoping, used both for military and internet electronic signal guidance and encryption still to this day. She gifted her patent to the USA government. Had she not done so, and had she been renewing her patent, her descendants would have now possessed, I read in an article several years ago, a fortune larger than that of Bill Gates.

The film was conceived as a 45 min. loop. This is why it ends quite unexpectedly, without any proper cinematic ending and credits.

To find out more about the Montreal First Peoples Film Festival and to consult the film scheduling, visit the Présence autochtone festival website.

You can also read more about the festival here.