In his first documentary feature, This May Be the Last Time, Sterlin Harjo guides us through the history of the beautiful hymns Native Americans sing in times of loss, celebration, and remembrance. This isn’t a rigid historical doc, however, as Sterlin uses the story of his grandfather’s mysterious death to tie the film together and imbue it with soul. From the hymns’ unexpected ties to Scottish and African cultures; to a white man who finds peace in the hymns; to the truth about Sterlin’s grandfather’s fate, the film is full of surprises and revelations. As we hear his interview subjects sing the Native hymns, it’s as if we see them transported to another place, where generations past and present can connect and be together once again.

We chatted with Sterlin on the phone about the similarities between his film and Interstellar; the spiritual effect of the songs; masking the academic aspects of the film; how directing actors is similar to interviewing documentary subjects; staying at Skywalker Ranch; how his grandfather’s story wasn’t supposed to be in the film at all, and more.

This May Be the Last Time is available now on iTunes, ThisMayBeTheLastTime.com, and other VOD platforms.

Have you seen Interstellar yet?
I haven’t, man. I was trying to see it when I was in L.A. because I wanted to see it at the Arclight, but I haven’t gotten to see it yet.

I saw it the day before I saw your film, and the two have a lot in common, thematically. It’s about generations, parents connecting with their children through time travel. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I feel like there’s a time travel aspect to your film in that these songs connect you and your people with your ancestors.
Totally. I’d say that’s a good way to look at it. That’s what the songs do for sure: transcend time. They take you to another place. Whenever you talk to people about the songs, the first thing they always say is who the song reminds them of.

There’s a sense from some of the interviews in the film that when these people start singing these songs, the songs sort of escape their bodies like they’re not doing it themselves. A really spiritual thing.
You know what’s weird? I grew up with the songs, so whenever I hear them, they definitely [feels] otherworldly. That probably has to do with my memory of being young and everything that that’s involved with. The cool thing about being around people when they sing is that it almost washes over you. It’s like waves hitting you. When someone dies is when you hear the songs a lot. It’s like this mourning or wailing. It’s a very healing thing.

A key person in the making of the film was Hugh Foley, a white man. There’s a great scene with him, the one where he talks about the first time he was asked to sing a Native hymn in church. He said it “propelled” from his body.
He’s an amazing guy. He was the key to the film for me. I didn’t want the film to be academic. His personal story is the story of the history of the songs, so I could get academic by telling Hugh’s story.

Ah, so you used Hugh’s story to mask the academic aspects of the film in a way.
I tried at first just to do the academic story that Hugh told me, and it just didn’t feel right. Once I decided to tell the story of Hugh, then it became something that worked.

What’s it like being in a room being filled with the sound of people singing these songs?
That’s the key. The best way to hear it is with the songs surrounding you. There’s something that might not come across in the film that happens. People will very quietly stomp their feet, tapping their heel almost, as they sing. You can hear this thud going through the church.

Talk about the sound design. I’m sure it was really important.
Yeah. It’s a movie about songs, so we needed great sound. I got this guy who’s a really great sound recorder, Royce Sharp. We also lucked out because a guy at Skywalker Sound was super into doing the sound mix. We actually got to do our sound mix at Skywalker, which was pretty unbelievable. We got to stay on the ranch and have this guy work on the film. Then, we listened to it in one of the best sounding theaters that exists, so it was pretty amazing.

This is your first documentary feature, but you’ve done narrative pictures in the past. You’re a storyteller whether you’re making either, but have you noticed advantages or disadvantages to employing each form?
I just made a new film, which is narrative. It was a pretty big release to be able to shoot my script. With the documentary, there was so much footage to shape the story out of. But with a fictional film, the story’s already there, so there’s less footage. Both have their challenges. Working with actors is definitely similar to interviewing people. You have to pull performances out of people. I’d do all the interviews [in the doc], and it’s like working with an actor.

So being that you’ve had a lot of experience working with actors, did you feel that your interview skills were pretty solid once you started work on the documentary?
Yeah, totally. I’d also done a documentary TV show for two years with these people in Tulsa, OK called This Land Press, and they actually funded this film and produced it. The show was called This Land TV, and it was these really cool vignettes and short documentaries about these people in OK. I spend two years doing interviews for that, so I got really used to it. We were doing three or four short documentaries per episode, so it was great training for this film.

I love how in the film you outline the history of these songs and how they were born out of the meeting of Seminole Indians, Anglos, and Africans.
That was very important. As Native people, we sometimes like to think we’re the baddest Indians on the block. There’s the enemy, which is Europeans, but it’s not that cut-and-dry. There were a lot of different relationships between different people with different ethnicities, and it was important to me to show these cultural exchanges between these groups. You just don’t hear about that a lot.

The story about your grandfather really ties the film together well. I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t the jumping off point for the film, though.
I didn’t plan on doing the story of my grandfather at all. I was just going to tell it to bookend the film. I wasn’t going to be in it, my voice wasn’t going to be in it. I just started shooting, and I’d tell people that the film would be bookended with this story about my grandpa, and it kept happening that people would tell me, “Oh, I was there.” Sometimes, I’d already packed my camera gear up, and I’d have to set it up again. These people happened to be there and…I don’t like the word that much, but it was serendipity I guess. It was pretty amazing. It was this abstract story I loved and I had heard over and over and over, but as I filmed, it became real. There were people there, and they’re still around. I knew that it had to be a part of the film, and everything could be told through me, almost like I’m the bridge for the audience.

The world’s largest indigenous festival, imagineNATIVE showcases a wide variety of film, radio and media from Indigenous artists around the world. Now in its 15^th year, the festival has brought an impressive selection of feature films to its line-up.

With the festival running between October 22 and 26, we wanted to let readers know some of the features worth checking out, especially since some screenings might be the only opportunity to catch some truly compelling films and stories in theatres. Be sure to read our thoughts below on our favourite films playing at imagineNATIVE, and check out the full line-up and schedule at www.imaginenative.org.

What We Do in the Shadows

Screens October 22 at 7pm (Opening Night Gala)

What We Do in the Shadows might have arrived late to the party (the vampire craze sparked by Twilight already reached its peak a while ago), but in this case it’s better late than never. Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi first conceived their film back in 2005 as a short, only to wait over 8 years before developing it into a feature. It’s a mockumentary following four vampires living together in New Zealand: stuck-up Viago (Waititi), ladies man Vladislav (Clement), “bad boy” Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) and 8000-year-old Peter, a Nosferatu-looking vampire who spends most of his time butchering people or sleeping in his tomb in the basement.

Kudos to Clement and Waititi for making such a funny film, especially since they are performing multiple variations of the same joke. What We Do in the Shadows mostly spends its time focusing on the way supernatural beings adapt to the kind of everyday banalities everyone else goes through. It’s a surprisingly adaptable joke, and whether it’s arguing over who’s slacking on their chores (“You have not done the dishes for five years!”) or trying to get invited into the city’s most popular nightclubs, it never stops being funny. That’s largely due to the hilarious cast, all of whom improvised their lines. Clement and Waititi wrote a script as the basis for the film, but the rest of the cast never saw any of their writing. It took over a year for the two of them to cut down over 100 hours of footage into a lean 90 minutes.

What We Do in the Shadows is certainly one of 2014’s funniest movies, a consistently hilarious take on vampires that thankfully puts the focus on keeping the jokes coming.

Drunktown’s Finest

Screens October 23 at 8pm

Taking place in a small New Mexico town described as a place meant for people to leave, Drunktown’s Finest opens with someone asking why people continue to stay. The rest of the film tries to answer that question by focusing on three Native Americans; Nizhoni (Morningstar Angeline), an adopted child trying to find out about her biological parents before heading off to college; Sick Boy (Jeremiah Bitsui), trying to stay out of trouble before going into basic training; and Felixia (Carmen Moore, excellent), a transsexual trying to become a Navajo model. All three characters share a desire to leave, hoping to make a better life for themselves outside of town.

Writer/director Sydney Freeland creates an earnest, well-meaning drama about identity and people’s connection to their roots. Freeland’s writing may lack subtlety, with a lot of on-the-nose dialogue expressing her film’s themes, but it has a great sense of character, providing well-rounded portraits of its three protagonists and their individual struggles. By the end of the film, where a ceremony brings the cast together, Freeland provides a clear answer to the question opening her film. The town may be lacking in opportunities, but its strong sense of family and community is the sort of thing that’s hard to walk away from.

Trick or Treaty?

Screens October 25 at 5pm

Alanis Obomsawin’s documentary premiered earlier this year at the Toronto International Film Festival, but those who missed out catching it the first time should try to see it during this festival. Obomsawin’s documentary may feel lacking in its presentation, a rigidly conventional form that feels a bit bland, but its content is absolutely vital. Treaty No. 9, aka the James Bay Treaty, was signed in 1905 by the Government of Canada and representatives of First Nations across Northern Ontario. First Nation leaders believed they were signing a treaty that promised their customs and ways of life wouldn’t be impacted by the government, so long as they let the Canadian government own the land. In reality, the treaty was an unconditional surrendering of the land to Canada. The government could do whatever they wanted.

Obomsawin shows evidence that government officials tricked First Nations officials into signing the treaty, essentially promising them whatever they wanted just so they could get a signature (due to the language barrier at the time, the terms of the agreement could only be explained orally). The film structures itself by looking into the past, present and future over the central issues surrounding the treaty. The first third explains the history of the treaty, while the second third focuses on the Idle No More movement, a series of protests by Aboriginals over Bill C-45, a piece of legislature making major changes to various environmental bills without consulting with First Nations groups. The final third looks to the next generation by showcasing a 1,000 mile trek taken by Cree youth to Ottawa in support of Idle No More. Obomsawin makes sure the anger from her film’s subjects always registers, but looks at the protests as a hopeful sign that change is on the horizon.

SOL

Screens October 24 at 5:30pm

In Igloolik, Nunavut, tragedy strikes a family when Solomon Uyrasuk, their young, talented son, dies while in RCMP custody. Officials rule the death as a suicide, but the family believes there might have been foul play. Directors Susan Avingaq and Marie Hélène-Cousineau don’t turn their documentary into a murder investigation. Instead, they use Solomon’s story to shine a light on a health crisis occurring in Northern Canada: an alarmingly high suicide rate, especially with youth. Every year the RCMP receives over 1,000 calls for suicide or suicide attempts in Nunavut, a province with a population of 35,000. The suicide rate in Nunavut is 13 times higher than the national average. With figures like these, alarms should start ringing for the government. Instead the issue is largely ignored, with one interview subject observing that suicides in Nunavut are treated as “just another thing to manage.”

And while Avingaq and Hélène-Cousineau expand their scope to cover an issue impacting all of Nunavut, they never forget what inspired their film. Footage and interviews of Solomon show he was a likable, talented performer, getting his start as a child actor in a TV series. In his adult years he joined a circus through a youth program dedicated to fighting against suicide, travelling to different countries as a performer. Avingaq and Hélène-Cousineau argue Solomon’s loss, among many others, could have been prevented, his actions a result of external factors more than internal ones. It’s hard to disagree with them, especially when their presentation is so affective and gorgeous (the widescreen compositions of Igloolik add a layer of sombre beauty to the proceedings). SOL should hopefully go on to gain greater exposure, as its subject matter begs for a wider audience.

This May Be the Last Time

Screens October 24 at 11am

Similar to SOL, director Sterlin Harjo uses a tragic incident to explore a larger issue. In 1962, Harjo’s grandfather mysteriously disappeared. When the local Seminole community searched for his body, they sang old hymns to help them find Harjo’s granddad. Harjo quietly looks into his own ancestry, as well as the origin of the hymnal music practiced by members of his tribe.

The results of his inquiry are fascinating, with the music having a background connecting it to Scottish missionaires, Appalachian music and Gospel hymns. The film’s title comes from a hymn that was a favourite of Harjo’s grandmother. Harjo finds out the song had its origins as a slave song in the 1800s, before going through gospel and blues to end up as a song by The Staple Singers in the 1950s. The Rolling Stones heard the song, and made their own version called “The Last Time.” Harjo gracefully tracks other hymns back to their origins, and in doing so highlights an aspect of music history that’s largely gone unnoticed.

Harjo ends things on a bittersweet note, closing with a hymn while commenting on how the tradition of sharing and learning music is slowly dwindling. This May Be the Last Time gives the now dying form of music its proper due.