Documentary moviemaker Sandra Osawa is one of the recipients of the 2008 Fargo Film Festival’s Bill Snyder Award, claiming the Best Documentary Feature and Best Native American Voices Documentary Feature awards for her movie Maria Tallchief. Osawa, a member of the Makah Nation, has been making movies since the 1970s, and has also taught screenwriting at Evergreen State College and video production at Seattle Community College.

She received a BA from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon and did graduate work at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television and the Universities of Washington and Oregon. Copies of Maria Tallchief are available for purchase from Upstream Video Productions by clicking here.

Maria Tallchief will be screened at the Fargo Film Festival on Thursday, March 6, 2008, at 8:40pm at the Fargo Theatre. Recently, Ms. Osawa spoke with the Fargo Film Festival.

How did you become interested in the subject of Maria Tallchief?

I choose my subjects very carefully as I know I will be with that subject for many years (in this case 7 years off and on). I like subjects that help us understand the more contemporary aspects of Indian identity and that help bring us fresh new ideas about what it means to be “Indian” in modern times. I like to think I’m opening up the definition of what it means to be Indian by including Indian ballerinas, Indian comedians, and Indian jazz musicians. It’s my opinion that we are seen largely as people of the past and largely as people with a problem. I like to show us as very much part of the present and very much a part of the solution.

I cannot believe that no one has done a full length documentary on Maria Tallchief and it only supports my idea that we are more accepted when we become our stereotypes. Sometimes the portrait of a successful Indian woman is a bit threatening and does not really fit the image that most people have when they think of American Indians. I think this speaks to who has the power to tell our stories and we as Indian people are only just beginning to have the ability to do this, so I think that’s why we are starting to see stronger stories emerge and ones that are grounded in real lives, lives that are inspiring and offer a lot of hope to our younger generation.

Your movie features footage of Tallchief dancing during her prime. Can you tell us a little bit about these images?

The footage of Ms. Tallchief dancing in her prime forms the corps of the story and this is the reason the film was delayed or on hold for close to three years. We could not obtain the rights to several key archival pieces and we could not tell the story without using both Orpheus and the Firebird berceuse. These are key roles in Tallchief’s career. We found beautiful clips in Montreal as the New York City Ballet performed there in the mid 1950s and it was broadcast in Canada. The opening moments with Swan Lake are from Montreal, Canada as well as the Les Sylphides ballet segment and Pas de Dix.

The early footage from Ballet Russe came from the Newberry Library and this is some of the earliest footage of Tallchief dancing. There was no sound, but you get a good idea of how innovative these dances were and are. People are very taken with the dancing and it is almost as if you could watch these clips over and over and never tire of them. For me her dancing has special quality and we try very hard to identify that on screen through various people commenting on her art. I’m very happy to be able to introduce Tallchief to a whole new generation of people who have not heard of her, for she deserves her unparalled place in history – both American Indian history and dance history.

What was the greatest challenge you faced during the production of Maria Tallchief?

The greatest challenge for me was to confront a legend and try not to be overwhelmed with the staggering prospect of trying to tell her story in fifty-six minutes and forty seconds, the standard PBS time frame. She has a big story with immense influence and I wanted to try to get it right – to not make any mistakes. I was aware of being an interpreter, so I had to read more, to listen more, and to be very cautious. I admit I had many years of fear when I felt that I could not finish due to untold obstacles and untold delays. As an artist, it is often very hard to reach down and find that bit of oxygen inside that will fuel you and help you get to the finish line.

The artists in our day are not well supported and I’m especially happy that I could include a clip of President Kennedy at the end of our film talking about the importance of art. His time period ushered in the greatest period of funding for artists and such funding has steadily declined over the decades. Now, it is quite a difficult task both to remain independent and to remain an artist. My husband, Yasu, and I have managed to do this for over 30 years and it is good to see our work being used and studied in such places as Harvard and Berkeley and other colleges across the country.

Cindy Stillwell, the winner of the 2008 Fargo Film Festival’s Experimental category for her movie High Plains Winter, received her Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University’s film program and since then has worked as a moviemaker and professor. She currently teaches film production in the Department of Media and Theatre Arts at Montana State University in Bozeman, where she works with undergraduate and graduate students. Cindy also runs Hybrid Media, which can be found online here. She graciously agreed to share some of her time and thoughts with the Fargo Film Festival.

How did you settle on the subject of High Plains Winter as a movie project?

High Plains Winter is the third film in a trilogy of Westerns. As the final film in the trilogy, it deals with the winter season and its effects on humans, animals, and the land.

Tell us a little bit about joring. It looks like a potentially dangerous sport.

I am not an expert on joring, and I have never even tried it! I know it is a sport that is supposedly Norwegian in origin. Many people tell me it started with dogs pulling the skier instead of horses. Some of my students at MSU Bozeman tell me they grew up doing this.

The sounds and images in your movie create a unique experience. Tell us a little bit about your production process.

My process is very slow. I shoot and then edit, and see what I’ve got. I love working this way, like a sculptor. For this film, I spent three “seasons” gathering the joring footage and the landscapes, so that is three years, three winters. I then went out and gathered the audio and wove it all together. The music was composed by a longtime collaborator named Jeffrey Arntsen. We have done enough projects that we have a kind of shorthand. He used to live here in Bozeman, but has since moved to Seattle, so we did a lot of emailing and Fed Ex-ing stuff, to get the right sounds in the music sections. He sent me stuff in layered tracks and all mixed together, so I could play with it as I wanted in my software.

High Plains Winter has been shown in many film festivals, including Sundance. Please share some of your memorable film festival experiences.

Well Sundance was a highlight. It is such a well-known venue and the thrill of being included was a fantastic experience because there is this whole system set up for you as a filmmaker. Navigating Sundance takes strength and power naps. Each day was like three days in one: meeting people, seeing films (which was hard to do), and taking advantage of the panels and meet-and-greets. Sundance was excellent for networking and for the experience.

The smaller venues, like the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana, provided a different kind of experience. I wouldn’t say it was better, just different. At Big Sky it was a smaller group so there was much more time to see films, meet the filmmakers and programmers, and really connect with people. That kind of intimacy can only be found at smaller festivals and I think it is a really rich experience.

I really enjoyed Rotterdam too, although it is more of a large-scale festival. Rotterdam programs all of the short films together and screens them in one venue, so the short makers can meet and talk and see each other’s films. This is really great because here it is not like the short film is relegated to something like a pre-feature endeavor. Rotterdam celebrates the short form as another aspect of filmmaking, so as a filmmaker I was never sidelined because I had a short as opposed to a feature. We are all filmmakers, regardless of the length of our shows.

After months of planning, dozens of meetings, hundreds of volunteer hours, and thousands of email messages, the 2008 Fargo Film Festival gets underway Tuesday, March 4, with the special showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at 7pm at the Fargo Theatre. A virtual shot-for-shot replication of the blockbuster classic, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is a testament to the magic allure of moviemaking and its intersection with feverish adoration.

Already emerging as one of the best-known “fan films” of the last twenty-five years, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation more than makes up for its lack of professionalism and polish with a sense of joy, fun, and dedication. Constructed by a trio of Mississippi boys over a period of six years, with a total budget of roughly $5,000, the feature-length experiment celebrates the can-do spirit of childhood.

The Fargo Film Festival recently talked with director Eric Zala about Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.

We are excited to have you and Chris visit Fargo. How much of your time is spent traveling to presentations of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation?

Chris and I are highly anticipating our trip to Fargo! Our time spent traveling and doing screenings varies widely, from once every other month, to three times a month. Gosh, there’s been many places and people that have been exciting to us over the past three years or so… from premiering at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, and returning several years later to find Quentin Tarantino in the audience, chatting with him in the lobby afterwards… to showing it on a little island in Sitka, Alaska… to showing it to employees of Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, CA, touching the actual Ark of the Covenant prop afterwards.

More recently screening it at ILM… showing it at Pixar… traveling to Oldenberg, Germany… Chris showed it in Australia… Boston, Seattle, Boulder, Chicago, San Francisco, Manhattan… and especially the smaller towns… Driggs, Idaho… Athens, Georgia… Galesburg, Illinois… Oxford, Mississippi.

Now that your story is being adapted into a studio feature, can you talk a little bit about what kind of involvement you and Chris and Jayson will have? Do you plan to participate in the production?

Our involvement in the Paramount Pictures-Scott Rudin movie about us is limited, as unofficial creative consultants. Screenwriter Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) interviewed each of us for about three hours over the phone initially. Since then, we’ve also met with Dan in person on a couple of occasions while in his neck of the woods, so we feel like he’s taken the time to get to know us, and clearly cares about doing our story right, which we appreciate. Time will tell whether we’ll have the option to be on set while they film. That would be pretty surreal as I think about it.

Many of the stories about the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation describe the variety of source material you used to stitch together the shooting script, including a collection of storybooks, comics, making-of publications and action figures. At any point in your process did you actually use a VHS copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark as a reference? Were there things you saw and thought, “We really nailed that,” or “Wow, we were way off there”?

Nope, when we started initially, in 1982, the original Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn’t available for rental. Video stores were in their infancy. So when the movie was re-released in theaters in 1982, we went two, three times, and tried to commit everything to memory. From there, I spent a whole summer drawing 602 storyboards, to capture the shot list, compositions, and details. Then Raiders of the Lost Ark came out on laserdisc and eventually VHS and Betamax. Watching it again, at last, by that point, was akin to a religious experience. And yeah, some details we felt we’d got… and some we didn’t. But it was already storyboarded, so we stuck with that.

Was there ever a point during the long process of shooting your movie that you thought about quitting? Teen-age boys are not often known for having the attention spans and stick-to-it-ive-ness to spend six or seven years working on a project like this. Tell us a little bit about how you and the other moviemakers managed to negotiate responsibility, collaborate, and resolve disagreements.

We had our conflicts, some fallings-out over the course of the seven years it took to make and complete our film. Thinking about it now, it’s remarkable that we didn’t have more tribulations in our friendship than we did, when one considers the amount of change you undergo as a person while growing from age twelve to nineteen… changing interests and priorities. Plus, add to that the fact that the three of us were (and are) such different personalities. One of the strengths of our trio is that being so different, our different strengths complemented when they could have clashed a lot more, one would think.

Over time, for example, Chris and I have reflected that one such pairing of complementing strengths is that one of Chris’s strengths is that he’s the starter, an initiator. It was his idea in the first place to remake Raiders, whereas I don’t think that I would have gone there on my own. On the other hand, we’ve also reflected that, of the two of us, I’m the finisher. I have a drive to push things to completion, to do whatever it takes to do things right.

Usually, these different strengths complement, although there were rare occasions on which they clashed, as when we all got in a big disagreement over how much work to give the sound in post-production. We had a blow-up, and we parted ways, not speaking to each other, at least not until the following summer when Last Crusade came out, and we came together again, renewed, and finished.

So, in summary, there were times where our friendship was indeed tested, sometimes ironically by our very differences that enabled us to both start and finish this huge project. We’ve mutually learned from our childhood experiences and apply those lessons even now, when as adults, we once again find ourselves tackling a big collaborative project together – an original feature film, a southern gothic action-adventure to be shot in Mississippi.

The program schedule for the 2008 Fargo Film Festival is now available to view online. Covering March 4-8, 2008, the complete, full color PDF of the program is identical to the printed version that will be available during the festival. The full program contains detailed information on all festival events, including luncheon panel topics, sessions and screening times for the Fargo Theatre and Roberts Street Theatre venues, parties, awards, and special showings. You can see the program here.

As preparations continue for the 2008 Fargo Film Festival, moviemakers still have an opportunity to submit their work to the 2-Minute Movie Contest. One of the festival’s signature events, the 2-Minute Movie Contest caters to the attention-span impaired. Best of all, the event is free and open to the public and will take place at the Roberts Street Theatre venue beginning at 7:30pm on Friday, March 7.

Moviemakers can see the complete official rules for entering the 2-Minute Movie Contest by clicking the EVENTS tab in the above menu. All entries must be received by the Fargo Theatre by 5pm on Friday, February 22. Moviemakers may submit up to two movies per person and there is no cost to enter.

Matt Olien is currently serving in his 4th year as co-chair of the Fargo Film Festival. Matt is passionate about the history of film, as well as how films are made and produced. Currently employed at Prairie Public Television in Fargo, Matt produces documentaries, several of which have received national awards and other recognition. Matt also teaches video production coursework at Minnesota State University Moorhead. Matt‘s movie reviews can be heard statewide on Prairie Public Radio each Friday afternoon at 3:45 on 91.9 FM in the Fargo-Moorhead area. Matt has been part of the Fargo Film Festival committee since its inception.

Matt enjoys going to movies with his circle of film friends, as well as spending time with his wife Desira and 6-year-old son Nicholas. Matt‘s vast personal collection of movies numbers more than 3,000 titles. Matt‘s favorite actors include Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis and James Cagney, and his favorite directors are David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock and Eric Rohmer. Matt is also an Oscar historian and nearly always has the answer when friends want to know the winners in a given category in any year. Matt is very excited about the 2008 Fargo Film Festival and looks forward to seeing many movies, moviemakers, and movie lovers at the festival March 4-8.

The Fargo Film Festival is proud to announce the line-up for its 2008 edition. Dozens of jurors watched many hours of submissions and completed the difficult task of narrowing down the entries in what was a highly competitive group of movies. The winning movies include Maria Tallchief (Documentary Feature), The Children of Leningradsky (Documentary Short), High Plains Winter (Experimental), Greetings from the Shore (Narrative Feature), Hiyab (Narrative Short), Work (Student Documentary), Quincy & Althea (Student Narrative), and Falling Up: The Dark Side of Indoor Track Meets (Music Video).

In the Native American Voices category, the winning movies include Maria Tallchief (Documentary Feature), Life on the Reservation (Documentary Short), The Reawakening (Narrative Feature) and 133 Skyway (Narrative Short). Congratulations to all the moviemakers whose work was selected for inclusion in the festival. The complete list of movies can be viewed here.

As one of the 2008 Fargo Film Festival co-chairs, Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson brings with her a wealth of experience. Kyja’s movies have screened in festivals and galleries in Asia, Europe and North America since the late 1990s. Her work has also been featured at the Walker Art Center, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the European Media Arts Festival to name a few. She is currently working on an experimental documentary, which she shot in Iceland with the support of a Fulbright Fellowship, and she is also expanding her series of animated shorts, Portraits & Testimonies.

Kyja is an Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Department at Minnesota State University Moorhead and was the recipient of a 2007 Bush Artist Fellowship. In addition to her responsibilities as the chair of the Experimental and Animation category, Kyja hopes to expand the scope of film and video for Fargo-Moorhead audiences by exhibiting work that challenges traditional form and technique to better articulate concepts, stories and creative vision.

With the close of submissions, the 2008 Fargo Film Festival committees have begun the challenging task of judging the entries to select the programming for the upcoming festival in March. Once again, moviemakers from near and far turned in their work, from three-minute shorts to two-hour features. The festival has also added a Music Video category this year, bringing the total number of divisions to eight. The Fargo Film Festival attracts a cross-section of engaging visual works from all over the world, and this year entries arrived from Spain, Canada, Poland, Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Additionally, sixteen different states were represented.

Harold “Rusty” Casselton, chair of the Film Studies Department at Minnesota State University Moorhead and one of the Fargo-Moorhead area’s most respected film historians, died December 30, 2007 at the age of 53. A tremendous supporter of the movies, especially the silent cinema, Rusty was known around the world for his efforts in film restoration and preservation. Rusty collaborated with mentor Ted Larson for many years, and their efforts resulted in a variety of wonderful opportunities for movie fans, who regularly attended popular events like Silent Movie Night at the Fargo Theatre and the Summer Cinema series on the campus of MSUM.

Additionally, Rusty participated in the Fargo Film Festival from the time of its inception, often providing a small army of students to help staff and run the various second venue locations as volunteers. His many relationships to film industry professionals also resulted in frequent festival submissions. A dedicated educator, Rusty taught film studies courses at Concordia College for 22 years before accepting a position at MSUM in 2001. He will be greatly missed by the Fargo Film Festival, his students, his extended family, his friends, his colleagues, and his wife Cindy and daughters Hannah and Amanda.