The imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, which ran Oct. 20-24 in Toronto, is an international event showcasing works by aboriginal peoples in the realms of film, video, radio and new media. Samantha Anderson kept a blog for CBCNews.ca on this year's festival.


Minda Martin answers questions from the audience after the Canadian premiere of her film Free Land. (Samantha Anderson/CBC)

Minda Martin's experimental documentary Free Land had its Canadian premiere this evening. The doc was full of archival footage, home video and original film showing the stark landscapes of middle America.

It traces the lives of Martin's ancestors and their stories of displacement during the forcible relocation of many Native Americans, including Cherokee, to so-called Indian Territory in the western U.S. in the 1800s -- as well as Martin's own realizations of the effect this had on her. She never lived on a reservation, but wanted to remind people to remember the sacrifices families made back then.

"Free Land is my coming-out film," Martin says, of being Cherokee.

"I come from somewhere other than everywhere," a voiceover states in the film, while the audience is taken through various images depicting the hard work and turmoil displaced people faced.

"You see the trains and that coal mine, you see the toughness," says Elizabeth Weatherford, the head of the Film and Video Centre at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, who attended the screening. Weatherford says the film touches on a part of history that is not talked about.

"[The film] made us all have to stretch our minds," Weatherford says.

Martin's grandparents alone moved 43 times, mostly around Arizona and New Mexico. One of her other descendants, Cordelia, moved a total of 67 times. Martin herself has moved around, and in the film, she remembers when her mother died; Martin was 16 at the time.

"I wanted to move as fast and as far away as possible," she says.

The archival footage from the late 1800s adds an unforgettable dimension to the film. Weatherford feels it "clothes the story with more feeling and emotion."

The film also includes shots of maps and dead buffalo, people writing telegraphs and close-ups of her father speaking.

Martin had actors interpret transcripts of conversations her ancestors had with census takers and other officials. The voices being heard in the theatre were haunting. It was clear that the interviewer did not see Martin's ancestors as credible human beings; Martin says this was an effect she was going for.

Martin says we are all political beings, and that we all have political stories. This was her way of expressing that idea, having been inspired by a feeling of responsibility to tell the story of her grandfather, a man to whom she'd been very close.

Tomorrow night promises more stories. Stay tuned.

-- Samantha Anderson