OKC Museum of Art featuring American Indian Cinema Showcase today-Saturday
The Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s American Indian Cinema Showcase, co-presented with the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum, is tonight-Saturday at the museum’s Noble Theater, 415 Couch Drive.
The showcase begins at 7:30 tonight with a screening of “GRAB,” an intimate portrait of the little-documented Grab Day in the villages of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, who annually throw water and food items from the rooftop of a home to people standing below.
It continues at 5:30 p.m. Friday with “Good Meat,” about one-time star athlete Beau LeBeau (Oglala Lakota) who has grown to weigh 333 pounds—an unhealthy weight that has triggered the onset of Type II Diabetes. His mother’s untimely death from complications due to diabetes motivates him to drop the excessive pounds. Enlisting the help of a physician and nutritionist, he starts exercising and takes up a traditional Lakota diet of buffalo meat and other Native foods.
At 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, the showcase will feature “A Good Day to Die,” which recounts the life story of Dennis Banks, the Native Americanwho co-founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968 to advocate and protect the rights of American Indians.
The series will include at 5:30 p.m. Saturday a series of documentary short films Sterlin Harjo and Matt Leach made for Tulsa’s This Land Press.
After the screening, the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle will present Harjo with the Tilghman Award in a short ceremony. The awards celebrates achievement in cinema in the state.
Harjo, a 31-year-old member of the Seminole and Creek Nations, has earned international acclaim for films examining contemporary life of Native people. But his feature-length narratives – “Four Sheets to the Wind” in 2007 and “Barking Water” in 2009 – are emotionally rich motion pictures populated by complex characters.
“Sterlin’s films are invested with a humanity and depth of emotion that eludes many of his older, more experienced peers,” says OFCC President Rod Lott in a news release. “In a short period of time, Sterlin has really raised the bar for Oklahoma filmmakers. He more than deserves the Tilghman for his commitment to his art.”
OFCC’s 19 member critics choose as recipients of the award those individuals who have made significant contributions to film, advanced awareness of film in Oklahoma or highlighted Oklahoma as the home of talented and productive filmmakers, actors and others in the industry. All The Oklahoman’s full-time film critics, including me, are members of the group.
For more information on the showcase, go to www.okcmoa.com.
-BAM
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