Picture House: Native American cinema class to start Nov. 4
Editor’s note: This press release was provided by the Picture House Regional Film Center.
October 2021 – Pelham, NY –The Picture House Regional Film Center (www.thepicturehouse.org) announced today a new film class for adults to premiere in November. In conjunction with National Native American Heritage month, TPH will offer a 3-week course on Native American cinema. The instructors for this course are filmmakers N. Bird Runningwater and Adam Piron. Bird Runningwater is the Director of Indigenous Program; DEI; and Artist Programs at Sundance Institute and Adam Piron is the Associate Director of Indigenous Program at Sundance Institute.
Images of Native Americans have been prevalent in American cinema since the late 1800s, but these images were often created without consultation or guidance from Native people. Contemporary First Nations filmmakers are working to redefine Indigenous identities on screen, capturing the complexities of their experiences and presenting new ways of telling their own stories. TPH’s Native American Cinema course will explore the rich and resonant films being made by Indigenous filmmakers.
Earlier this year, Bird Runningwater was named The Picture House’s Industry Impact Award Honoree. When accepting the award Runningwater said “When I first started my career in media…I hoped that I could have an impact on the invisibility of Native Americans in their own homelands and in American popular culture… I recognized at a very young age that a lot of the misrepresentations that did rarely appear on our screens were hugely inaccurate, but I could also turn to authenticity through the storytelling of my communities…I want to implore…viewers to really seek out the body of work that we have created through Sundance Institute and through our multitribal, multigenerational storytelling community.”
Classes will take place online via Zoom on November 4, 11, and 18. Registration is open now.
For more information about TPH’s education programs, please visit www.thepicturehouse.org, call (914) 738-7337, or email [email protected].
