![]() ![]() ![]() She was about to apply for college, leave the reservation - she moves several times in the course of the film - fight for custody of her children, and take her ex-husband to federal court over abuse of their daughter. I wasn’t sure at first that she was the right one,” he said, “because she had worked on the same job for nine years, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so I looked at her as a passive character. ![]() “You need to find someone who you think can go the distance and also somebody who might be able to effect change, but that’s it. He also “figured, seriously, that white men had caused Native Americans enough trouble, what did they need me for?”īut one thing led to another, and after interviewing 50 women, he settled on Charboneau. He had wanted to return to the prairie, which he loves (he made “The Farmer’s Wife” in Nebraska), and to do something on the theme of abuse. Sutherland did not set out to make a film about Native Americans. I used to say I’m slow because it’s the rhythms of everyday life - on this film it’s a little faster, because it’s only five hours - but I don’t know how I could take it any faster and give you a feel for them and watch them change and make you care about them.” Length, Sutherland said, “lets you see your characters change, and often, especially in a film like this, where you have a protagonist who’s setting out on a new journey when you start, who’s sort of up in the air, you don’t know where you’re going. He follows his subjects over a long period of time shooting for “Kind Hearted Woman” lasted three years and change, and his movies stretch accordingly. You think for a moment that this is going to be a story about staying straight, but it turns into something quite different: Its business encompasses sexual abuse, child endangerment, divided families, incompetent bureaucracy and failed justice, but it is also about love, perseverance, child-rearing, growing up, self-knowledge and life in the North. When we meet her, she is newly sober, back from rehab and having her apartment spiritually purified. The new film centers on Robin Charboneau, an Oglala Sioux in her early 30s from North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation. You can’t generalize from them, but in the striving (and failures, and striving) of its particular protagonists, you do connect with what it means to be human. There is nothing programmatic about these films they are not out to make a point but to show you a life. David Sutherland is the director of three remarkable documentary films - I should say at least three, having seen only the last three - notable for their length and their depth: “The Farmer’s Wife,” from 1998, a 61/2-hour look at a farm family in crisis the six-hour “Country Boys,” from 2005, about two teenagers in Appalachia and now “Kind Hearted Woman,” set in North Dakota, Minnesota and southern Canada, which follows a Native American woman and her two children as they make a family in the wake of abuse.Īll three films have made their way into the world through television - specifically the PBS series “Frontline,” which Monday and Tuesday on KOCE will present the new film in cooperation with “Independent Lens” - and together they form a trilogy on the subject of “rural poverty.” And they do indeed portray the stresses of life as it is lived on little money.īut to stop with that description is to draw a line around the subjects that does them a disservice. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |