Nu Ho Ni Yeh: Our Story

This screening took place on Monday, July 4, 2016 at 12:44 pmKwanlin Dün Cultural Centre

Free screening at Adäka Cultural Festival Nu Ho Ni Yeh: Our Story Dir by Mary and Allan Code, 1993, MB/YT, 55 min This powerful film produced from an Aboriginal perspective, has won many awards in recognition of its exploration of the history and current circumstances of the Sayisi Dene, a people of the ecological and cultural borderlands between tundra and forest in Canada. While specific to the Sayisi Dene, the film provides an excellent introduction to complex issues of politics, land rights, cultural ecology and processes of cultural destruction and rebirth that are of widespread concern in the circumpolar Arctic. It is a well-integrated film using historical photographs, archival material and contemporary film records that, together with the strong testimony of the Sayisi Dene people themselves, combine to provide a positive statement of human potential. In Dene and Englsh with English subtitles. Preceded by: Aydaygooay Dir. Mary Code, Yukon, 2007, 6 min Aydaygooay had power nobody knew and he brought the caribou back. A Sayisi Dene legend told through the combination of live action video and hand-drawn animation. Filmmakers in attendance. Mary Code bio Mary was born in a tent at a caribou crossing on Little Duck Lake, near Caribou Post in northern Manitoba. Her family and community were relocated abruptly by the Federal Government of Canada in 1956. Mary trained as a nurse, raised a family and turned to filmmaking in 1990, co-producing and co-directing Nuhoniyeh: Our Story, a Gemini Award winning documentary history of the Sayisi Dene. Today, Mary lives in Whitehorse, Yukon and Tadoule Lake, Manitoba. Aydaygooay, her first animated production, was created to help reclaim language and culture. Allan Code bio Allan Code is a Gemini Award-winning filmmaker and producer of wildlife, social, historical and cultural documentary in Northern Canada for Canadian and global audiences for nearly four decades; much of Code’s work has been independent, built upon stories drawn from life in Canada’s North, from Hudson Bay and Baffin to Yukon Territory. Productions have also involved filming in Northern Siberia and many places in Alaska. Whitehorse has been his home base for more than 15 years. Arriving at Queens University at age seventeen, Code was introduced to documentary by faculty-founding professor Peter Harcourt. It was a formative time in the development of documentary in Canada, and Harcourt’s teachings were possibly too inspiring! Code produced and edited a couple of films for CBC and CTV at Queens Film House and was “gone North” as a filmmaker at age twenty (without a degree). He married a Dene girl, Mary Clipping, and the story of her people, a history of endurance, adaptation and life on the land, became intertwined when the Sayisi Dene moved back to their tree line and tundra homeland in the early 1970s. The Codes became part of building a new community with axe, tent and log cabin. In 1992, Mary and Allan channeled experiences of the Sayisi Dene Elders into an independent social/historical/wildlife documentary “Nuhoniyeh: Our Story”. Recent HD Films directed and/or produced/shot/edited by Allan Code include We Are Our Language (2014) about revitalization of Yukon indigenous language, Team Bones (Documentary Channel 2014) which follows a British orthopedic surgeon and amputee on the longest wilderness paddle race in the world, Dugout (The Documentary Channel 2013): a team of young people on an isolated island carve a sea-going dugout canoe from a single giant log. Code is currently working with White Pine Pictures to direct and produce a five-part wilderness series.