Navajo Talking Picture
Native Nonfiction
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40m
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.
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