Directed by Arlene Bowman • 1985 • United States
In NAVAJO TALKING PICTURE, Diné film student Arlene Bowman travels to a Reservation to document the traditional ways of her grandmother. In spite of her grandmother’s forceful objections to this invasion of her privacy, the filmmaker persists. Ultimately, what emerges is a thought-provoking work that calls into question issues of “insider/outsider” status in a portrait of an assimilated Navajo struggling to use a “white man’s” medium to capture the remnants of her cultural past.
Up Next in Native Nonfiction
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White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men
Directed by Terry Macy and Daniel Hart • 1996 • United States
This award-winning documentary deals with the popularization and commercialization of Native American spiritual traditions by non-Indigenous people. Important questions are asked of those seeking to commercially exploit rituals and sa...
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Miss Navajo
Directed by Billy Luther • 2007 • United States
For more than fifty years, Navajo people have gathered in the capital of the Navajo Nation to witness the Miss Navajo Nation beauty pageant. This illuminating documentary traces twenty-one-year-old Crystal Frazier’s quest to win the Miss Navajo cro...
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maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the ...
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2020 • United States
A poetic experimental documentary circling the origin of the death myth of the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, MAŁNI—TOWARDS THE OCEAN, TOWARDS THE SHORE follows two individuals as they wander through nature, the spirit world, and somethi...
