Rejoice, moviegoers, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy: The ninth annual Anchorage International Film Festival kicks off Friday night. From Dec. 4 through Dec. 17, Anchorageites will have opportunities to watch 175 films from all over the world -- including films made by and about Alaskans. Notable among the entries are two films that aim to capture the spirit of Alaska Native tradition in two very different ways. One is a documentary filmed in Alaska; the other is a fantasy set in an Alaska that only exists in the mind of its teenage heroine.
"A Beautiful Journey"
Every summer, Athabascan elder Daisy Stri da zatse Demientieff makes a 750-mile journey down the Tanana and Yukon rivers to gather materials for making baskets. She's one of only three women alive who knows how to make split willow trays. In "A Beautiful Journey," documentarian Maria Williams comes along for the ride.
Williams, an associate professor of music and Native American studies at the University of New Mexico, has known Demientieff for close to 20 years. The idea to film Demientieff's annual pilgrimage came to her several years ago, when Demientieff told her how challenging the process had become since her husband passed away.
"You can only go in the month of June," Williams said Demientieff told her. "That's the only time the birch bark comes off. That's the only time the roots are good."
Armed with a small grant from UNM and a video camera, Williams undertook the long journey down the rivers with Demientieff and her son, Mike Demientieff Jr. The trip from Nenana to the Demientieff family fish camp near Tanana takes at least five days -- and that's if you're "really pushing it," Williams said. Some nights were spent in villages along the way; other nights they slept in the boat.
Williams said she wanted to show people the tremendous amount of history and tradition behind Demientieff's craft.
"I think people look at Alaska Natives and think, 'oh, they make crafts,'" she said. "They don't see the language. They don't see the knowledge of the environment."
Gathering materials isn't easy; it involves knowing where to look for good willow roots and birch bark, and understanding how to harvest the right materials at the right time.
"It's not like you just go down to the art store," Williams said.
In one scene, Demientieff works her way along a muddy embankment, cutting willow roots from the bank as her toy poodle, wearing a tiny sweatshirt, scrabbles along behind. Later she balances precariously in the boat, harvesting roots while trying to keep the bank from crumbling as her son holds the boat steady. It's a tense scene even before you remember there's a third person sitting in the boat, trying to keep hold of a video camera.
"I got caught in the roots a couple of times," Williams said. "The water was kind of rough that day."
Demientieff has made only seven trays in her life. At one point, sitting with a tray in progress in her lap -- about the size of a small Moose's Tooth pizza -- she tells the camera she's been working on this one for about two years. It's not fast work, and by the time she finishes one she's spent so much time with it she almost doesn't want to sell it.
"Maybe I become attached to it," Demientieff says, rolling the unfinished tray in her hands.
"A Beautiful Journey" is "100 percent Native-made," according to Williams, who is Tlingit. In addition to documenting Demientieff's work, Williams said she wanted to preserve Demientieff's Degxinag language, which has only about 20 living speakers.
"I really wanted to emphasize the language," Williams said. "I feel like it's an endangered art and an endangered language ... Language is a world view, and I wanted that to be reflected."
Williams said she sees Alaska Natives "coming into their own" in recent years, and she hopes "A Beautiful Journey" is part of a trend.
"I want to see more Native-made films," she said.
"Dear Lemon Lima"
At the other end of the reality spectrum is "Dear Lemon Lima," a feature film written and directed by California filmmaker Suzi Yoonessi. Set in Fairbanks but filmed in Seattle, "Dear Lemon Lima" is "supposed to be something that's filled with delight and subverts the family film genre," Yoonessi said.
"Dear Lemon Lima" draws in some ways from Yoonessi's own adolescence, she said, even taking images directly from her "rainbow-studded diary." While it's not an autobiographical film, she said, it does have autobiographical elements.
Vanessa, the film's heroine, is a half-Yupik high school student who struggles to come to terms with her cultural identity in the face of the well-intentioned -- but tragically ignorant -- efforts of the adults in her life. Yoonessi, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from Iran, can relate.
"I think people assume that being Alaska Native means you look like Pocahontas," Yoonessi said. "A girl can be from a different background and at the same time be someone everyone can relate with."
Yoonessi didn't set out to write a film about Alaska.
"I had written the first and second drafts of the script and just set it in the middle of nowhere, someplace cold," she said. (Yoonessi grew up in upstate New York and was looking for a similar "sense of isolation.") After writing two drafts of the script, she made a trip to Alaska, where she saw the World Eskimo-Indian Olympic competition for the first time. Watching the traditional games, she said, she saw exactly the kind of philosophy she wanted to incorporate into "Dear Lemon Lima."
"(WEIO is about) celebrating your differences and celebrating your culture," she said. "It just was so aligned with the message of the film."
That's how Yoonessi ended up planting her (now half-Native) heroine in the middle of a fictional Fairbanks prep school where WEIO games have been co-opted by the school's administration into an annual "Snowstorm Survivor" event that pits students against one another in bitter competition. Vanessa, who doesn't fit the school's super-competitive mold, assembles her own Snowstorm Survivor team of misfits, with whom she attempts to subvert the school's macho power structure.
Anchorage audiences will doubtless take issue with the film's set-in-Alaska pretense; the setting looks nothing like Fairbanks, and there are some elements that just aren't comprehensible to Alaskans: An amusement park? Teenagers hanging out in a wading pool -- in the sunshine -- during midterms?
"More than anything, I would've loved to shoot it in Alaska," Yoonessi said. "There wasn't the support system in place." Despite her best efforts, Yoonessi couldn't find a way to make it work financially, and she resigned herself to filming in Washington state.
At no point does the physical setting of "Dear Lemon Lima" feel anything at all like Alaska, but Yoonessi does capture some of the emotional reality of living in a place where even well-intentioned attempts at multiculturalism are fatally flawed by ignorance. Only Alaskans will be in on the joke when school administrators repeatedly remind Vanessa she's a standard bearer for her culture as the school's Molly Hootch Scholar. (A student from Emmonak, Hootch successfully sued the state in the 1970s to require the establishment of high schools in Alaska Native villages.) And the actress who plays Vanessa, Savanah Wiltfong, is really part Alaska Native.
Ultimately, "Dear Lemon Lima" feels like something that might happen if Wes Anderson and Diablo Cody collaborated on a film set in Alaska. The story is fantastic enough that it's possible to suspend some disbelief and start to accept that, while the setting is no Alaska we would recognize, it is believable as Vanessa's version of a place called Fairbanks.
"The whole movie is so magical ... I think you just have to accept you're in another world," Yoonessi said. "Vanessa makes no claims to live in the real world."
The most important thing, Yoonessi said, is that the film conveys a message of kindness and hope.
"There's just not a lot of hope in independent cinema," she said.
5:30 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 5
Bear Tooth Theatre, 1230 W. 27th Ave.
"A Beautiful Journey" (with "Queen Salmon" and "The Woods Between")
12:45 p.m., Saturday, Dec.12
Bear Tooth Theatre
5:30 p.m., Sunday, Dec. 13
Alaska Experience Theatre, 333 W. 4th Ave.
Contact Maia Nolan at maia_alaskadispatch.com.