The highlight of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, and winner of the Roger’s Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary and the Hot Docs audience Award, was Yintah, directed by Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell, and Michael Toledano. Yintah means “land,” a word that encompasses, too, those who lay down their livelihoods to protect it. Over a decade of escalation by the RCMP at the behest of Canadian governmental bodies and TC Energy, we watch Wet’suwet’en land defenders stake their claim on unceded territory, captured by journalists who have put their bodies on the exact same line, in solidarity and upholding the responsibility of their ethics in approaching these communities to capture their fight. This film showcases a decentralized method of representation and power, collective bodies organizing across various camps throughout the Yintah. It’s impossible not to see reverberations of Alanis Obomsawin’s shattering 1993 document of the Oka crisis here: Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance often displays identical methods of community protection and police engagement that’s observed over these last years in Yintah, inferring to those analyzing an intertextual read that the treatment of Indigenous populations in so-called Canada hasn’t remotely changed, with state violence persisting to encroach and transgress the sovereign rights of native communities. In 2023, CBC reported that only 13 of 94 calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation commission have been completed in the eight years since its establishment (2015), and in 2023 exactly zero were accomplished. The performative promises of a federal government become a veil under which the actions of their police arm can go untempered, even as thousands march into the streets in protest across the country.
Yintah’s exceptional proximity and montage, its resolute duty to confront the violation and expropriation ongoing, is reflected in the filmmakers’ unwavering ideology. During each screening, the filmmakers and subjects expressed complete and unquestionable solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide, expressly demanding that Hot Docs take responsibility for their contradiction. How dare they enthusiastically host this film while cozying up with an integral economic node in TC Energy’s infrastructure, enabling the Coastal Gasoline Pipeline, which represents an environmental and mortal threat to the peoples they now invite up onto their stage. The makers and subjects of Yintah called out Hot Docs with the central tenets and demands made by the No Arms in the Arts counter festival, where cross-pollination was a common occurrence, artists and patrons alike articulating and confronting the political tensions that ultimately determine the ethical fiber of our community as a whole.
DIRECTOR: Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell, & Michael Toledano; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: October 18; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 5 min.
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