Discover MAC New's Exhibition

To begin, the exhibition explores the motivations of this artist, who, from a very early age, showed tremendous will and courage. Next, it looks at the 1960s, when Obomsawin first emerged as an artist and Indigenous rights activist.

Each section is organized around a selection of her most important films and accompanied by various artworks and documents for broader context.
 

Alanis Obomsawin came to cinema from performance and storytelling. Hired by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) as a consultant in 1967, she has created an extraordinary body of work ''56 films and counting'' including landmark documentaries like '' Incident at Restigouche'' and ''Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance''. The Abenaki director has received numerous international honours and her work was showcased in a 2008 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In addition, the artist has consistently succeeded in using public platforms to advance Indigenous concerns and tell Indigenous stories. She has done this so effectively and with such integrity as a documentary filmmaker working at the NFB that she has become a revered and beloved figure among Indigenous communities and is celebrated both in Canada and abroad. Obomsawin has created a model of Indigenous cinema that privileges the voices of her subjects while challenging the core assumptions (economic, environmental, political, epistemic, ontological) of a world system created by colonialism that still exists and with which we must contend today.