SAAG Cinema is pleased to partner with the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival (WAFF) to bring a selection of award-winning films. Coleen Rajotte, co-founder of WAFF, has been coordinating this incredible film festival in Winnipeg for 20 years. Rajotte will be in attendance to lead a discussion following each film. SAAG Cinema is also excited to be moving to the big screen, as these films will be shown at the Movie Mill in Lethbridge (1710 Mayor Magrath Dr S). Tickets for each screening are $10 for the public and $5 for SAAG members. This event is made possible in part by the support of the Reconciliation Lethbridge Advisory Committee.

For more information and to purchase tickets, visit our event page.

PORTRAITS FROM A FIRE | 3 - 5 PM | $10 | $5 with SAAG Pass | THE MOVIE MILL 

1 hr 32 mins | 2021 | Comedy, Drama

Possessing more determination than discernible talent, teenage Tyler (William Magnus Lulua) routinely premieres his lo-fi DIY films on his reservation for a smattering of viewers who struggle to stay awake. Undaunted, he maintains the belief that he and his films are bound for bigger things — at the very least, they can be a bigger draw than bingo. Just as his new friend Aaron (Asivak Koostachin) practically manifests from the ether to provide him with some welcome encouragement, a DV tape resurfaces that casts new light on his family’s history and may just provide answers to questions that he’s long harboured.

TREVOR MACK is an award-winning filmmaker from the Tsilhqot'in nation of interior British Columbia, Canada. For Portraits from a Fire, Mack returns to the reserve where he grew up, delivering an accomplished, open-hearted first feature made about and in collaboration with his community. Mingling authenticity and invention, Mack employs recurring formal flourishes to illustrate the porousness of the membrane separating past and present. As Tyler abandons escapism in favour of unearthing difficult truths, Mack testifies that where there is trauma, there is likewise the opportunity for healing.

MALNI - TOWARDS THE OCEAN, TOWARDS THE SHORE | 7 - 9 PM | $10 | $5 with SAAG Pass | THE MOVIE MILL

1 hr 22 mins | 2020 | Documentary

A poetic experimental documentary circling the origin of the death myth from the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore follows two people as they wander through their surrounding landscape, the spirit world, and something much deeper inside. With luscious imagery and a seducing score, filmmaker Sky Hopinka takes us on a journey through language and belief. We follow Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier on their separate paths, contemplating their afterlife, rebirth, and death. A beautiful lesson arises about humanity’s place on this and other worlds, deceptively small and profoundly deep.  małni is stunning on the big screen in both cinematography and concept. The film becomes more beautiful with the artistic use of language, spoken and written. The intimate film unfolds to something so large you’ll be thinking (& dreaming) about it long after.

SKY HOPINKA (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.

Hopinka’s work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 FRONT Triennial. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and was a part of Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, a recipient of an Alpert Award for Film/Video, and is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.