Reel Injun ‘brilliant’, ‘outstanding’

Laughter and cheers greeted Cree film director Neil Diamond’s feature documentary Reel Injun during the Sept. 10 opening of the Biindigaate Film Festival.
“There’s always different responses from different audiences, but tonight they were laughing so much,” Diamond said after his 85-minute film which retells the history of the Hollywood Indian was screened at the Paramount Theatre in Thunder Bay. “They usually laugh, but they were laughing at some things that other people don’t laugh at.”
Diamond, who now lives in Montreal but is originally from Waskaganish First Nation on the Quebec side of James Bay, said his film received a more subdued reception during its premier at the Toronto International Film Festival last September.
“It was a huge theatre in downtown Toronto and most of the audience was industry people, not very many Native people but there was a whole pocket of Native people in the audience — it was funny, every once in a while it would only be just the Native people laughing,” Diamond said. “Then it opened ImagineNATIVE (Film + Media Arts Festival) about a month later and it was probably like 95 per cent Native people. The atmosphere was just electric, people were cheering in the middle of it, and laughing — it was just great.”
Reel Injun looks at how the myth of the Indian has influenced the world’s understanding and misunderstanding of Native people.
“It was very informative,” said Nick Sherman, a musician from Sioux Lookout. “It shed a lot of light on how Indians were portrayed and are being portrayed now. For myself, being younger, it was good to see how it was before I was born.”
Sherman was more familiar with films from the 1990s, such as Smoke Signals, Dance Me Outside and Dances With Wolves.
“It was kind of funny how ... that legacy of being a cowboy carries on into our age now,” Sherman said. “Even now with films that come out, action movies now, you want to be that Americanized dream of the guy defending their country. I think it’s still a battle of trying to establish the Indian identity into films. This film really shed light on that.”
The film features clips from hundreds of classic and recent films and interviews with celebrated Native and non-Native directors, writers, actors and activists, including Clint Eastwood, Robbie Robertson, Sacheen Littlefeather, John Trudell and Russell Means.
Anna Gibbon, Thunder Bay’s Aboriginal liaison and a member of the Biindigaate Film Festival Committee, said Reel Injun was “absolutely outstanding.”
“When people are confronted with images of who they thought Anishinabe people are, and they really see who we really are, it is just outstanding,” Gibbon said.
Mississauga First Nation’s Edwin Redsky said Reel Injun was “brilliant.
“It was funny, I found myself pretty choked up from time to time again, but it was very on point and it did a great job of telling how it was,” he said.
Diamond first developed the idea for Reel Injun about 10 years ago after watching a film with a non-Native actor playing an Indian character.
“I had an idea to do a half-hour documentary to poke fun at those actors who play Indians,” Diamond said.
Diamond has seen some “really good” films and documentaries being made in Canada and around the world since then, including a Maori film he recently watched in Santa Fe that has parallels to Native life in Canada in what the Maori’s laugh at their lifestyles, but he still sees some of the old attitudes in Hollywood.
“Some things have changed but some things have stayed the same,” Diamond said. “There are still films that come out where the Native people are just pretty much like window dressing.
It’s just lazy filmmaking, lazy storytelling, they don’t bother fleshing out the characters.” But overall, Diamond believes Hollywood is changing for the best.
“It’s all coming full circle,” Diamond said. “At the beginnings of Hollywood, two of the most successful film directors, producers, writers and actors were two Native guys (Evan Carewe and James Young Deer) who were telling Native stories.”