Actresses Roseanne Supernault with Tantoo Cardina from the film "Every Emotion Costs." (Photo by Scott Savarie)
The Pocahontas Reframed: Native American Storytellers Film Festival at the Byrd Theatre is a varied display of how Native Americans from across the country tell their own stories.
Free to attend, the festival runs Nov. 17-19 and features 14 films, including including Sundance favorite “Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World,” which details how Link Wray, Jimi Hendrix, Buffy Sainte-Marie and other musicians with Indian roots changed the course of popular music. Other films include the biopic “Te Ata,” which portrays the life of famous Native American actress Mary Thompson Fisher, "Every Emotion Costs," about a woman who returns to a reservation to face her responsibilities, and "Neither Wolf nor Dog," which details the journey of a white writer drawn into modern Native American life.
Virginia Commonwealth University professor Peter Kirkpatrick, a co-founder of Richmond’s French Film Festival, was inspired to start the film festival after teaching a class on Native American films. Members of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe got involved with directing the event, along with other tribes in the state. Organizers are already confident about the possibility of future festivals.
"There is no one ... who thinks this isn't going to happen next year. This is a beginning of a continuity," says Todd Schall-Vess, general manager for the Byrd Theatre, at a press conference for the event.
The festival also includes a number of musical acts, among them Nataanii Means, a hip-hop artist and filmmaker who grew up on Navajo Nation reservations. Means also spent several months at Standing Rock, a reservation located in North and South Dakota, and the site of a protest against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
"The greatest storytellers we have are our freedom fighters," Means says. "It's up to people to listen."
The festival is sponsored in part by veteran film director Francis Ford Coppola, who contacted members of the Pamunkey tribe for permission use a tribal name for his California restaurant. They mentioned the festival and the director offered to assist with supporting the event, which is sponsored the Williamsburg-based 2019 Commemoration American Evolution.
