Film finds reconciliation through art

Reconciliation comes into focus at the Metro Cinema with a special premiere screening of an important and locally made documentary tomorrow.

Lana Gets Her Talk is a look into the world and art of Lana Whiskeyjack, a multidisciplinary artist from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation. The film centres her work to complete a mixed media sculpture of the tortured face of her uncle – a piece she calls Losing My Talk – but it opens up the door to a conversation about healing and her journey as the daughter of a residential school survivor.

This isn’t simply a glimpse into a working artist’s studio though. Essentially, it’s about recovering the dignity, identity, and voice that once were lost.

“She uses it as a teaching piece to talk about the history of the residential schools and ways of healing, and how she herself uses art as her own ceremony and way of healing from the challenges that she has faced as the child of a survivor and as a woman in modern society,” said Beth Wishart MacKenzie, the film’s director.

“The film is a short study of an artist and her work but layered into that is a whole examination of this troubling chapter of our history.”

Tomorrow’s premiere is a co-presentation by the Dreamspeakers Film Festival and the Reconciliation in Focus film series at Metro Cinema.

Whiskeyjack’s story is not just about the trauma that transcends generations through a family but it’s also about resilience and the way that art can be therapeutic.

The director first became aware of her while she was working on a project a few years ago at Blue Quills First Nations College in St. Paul. She filmed a documentary study called Gently Whispering the Circle Back about how healing circles were addressing the trauma of residential schools and how people were moving forward from the trauma. The college was once a residential school. There, she spoke with survivors and their children, one of whom was Whiskeyjack.

“I’m very much interested how the religious traditions that shape our lives have transplanted themselves here and how we cross-pollinate one another, and influence one another and try and live side by side,” MacKenzie said.

Whiskeyjack showed the filmmaker the early stage of the sculptural mask that became the starting point for Lana Gets Her Talk. MacKenzie has been following the artist and the art piece over their mutual evolution for about three years now. The result is a wonderful, honest and affirming piece of the reconciliation puzzle.

“Lana is very honest and shares so freely her vulnerability. People find her really engaging but she’s also very articulate and able to use her artwork to say so much. A lot is compressed into a very short time. I guess you see not only a transformation in the artwork but because we’d followed Lana for a number of years, you see a transformation in her. She went through some difficult times over that period but there’s this beautiful, positive energy that arcs through the film that she comes to her good place as the film resolves.”

Tomorrow’s event includes the screening of the 37-minute long film followed by a question and answer session with both MacKenzie and Whiskeyjack. There will be musical performances by flautist Amanda Lamothe and a cappella trio ASANI, indigenous performing artists who contributed music to the film, with a tea and bannock reception in the lobby afterward. There in the lobby is the Metro Cinema Gallery where people can also look deeper into the artist’s work at a special exhibit.

The screening officially marks the launch of ‘pĂ®kiskwe-speak’, a Canada Council for the Arts New Chapter Initiative cross-country touring art and film installation featuring Whiskeyjack’s piece Losing My Talk and the film Lana Gets Her Talk.