For its third consecutive year, Recovering Voices hosted the Mother Tongue Film Festival, attracting over 600 people to watch and engage with 23 films in 29 indigenous or endangered languages in honor of the United Nations International Mother Languages Day (February 21). Recovering Voices, a collaboration between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of the American Indian, and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, brought awareness to the importance of mother languages by holding screenings in three locations across the Smithsonian and engaging with more filmmakers than ever before.
Opening night of the Recovering Voices Mother Tongue Film Festival was held at the National Museum of the American Indian on Wednesday, February 21st. Guests were welcomed with a reception and drum circle by the Uptown Boyz, an intertribal Powwow drum group based in Washington, DC. Joshua A. Bell, Curator of Globalization at NMNH and founder of the MTFF, David Penney, Associate Director for Museum Scholarship, Exhibitions, and Public Engagement at NMAI, and Gwyneira Isaac, Curator of North American Ethnology and Director of Recovering Voices at NMNH all spoke to the significance of this annual event and the importance of continuing to highlight mother languages.
Technology played a notable role throughout the festival. The inspiring Women Directors Round Table was webcast and is now available for streaming here. Twice during the festival directors connected via video conference to discuss their films with the audience after a screening. Out of State producer, Beau Bassett, connected via face call on Thursday night from Hawai`i and Paula Whetu Jones, director of a short film within Waru, a sequence of eight short films, spoke to the Friday night audience from Aotearoa/New Zealand. This use of available technologies allowed filmmakers and audiences who could not travel to Washington, DC to connect with the festival.
New for 2018 was a cross-over with the Environmental Film Festival, showing the Mother Tongue Film Festival Shorts at NMAI on March 17th and March 24th. These films added three mother languages to the Mother Tongue Film Festival’s count and further broadened the reach of awareness of mother languages to new audiences who were otherwise simply attending Environmental Film Festival programs. Screenings for these films left standing room only for viewers.
The festival was made possible through the combined efforts of the MTFF committee members including Joshua Bell, Melissa Bisagni, Amalia Córdova, Mary Linn, Sarah Baburi, Haley Bryant, Emily Cain, Nafisa Isa, Laura Sharp, and Mariano Bartolomeu. Financial and partner support was provided by the collaborating Smithsonian units NMNH, CFCH, and NMAI as well as the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center, Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of African Art, NMNH Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Latino Center, and external supporters Indigenous Media Initiatives, Mexican Cultural Institute, and the New Zealand Embassy. The committee would like to thank all who attended and supported this event.
The 2019 Mother Tongue Film Festival will bring a completely new set of mother tongue language films from around the world. We aim to include many languages not previously featured at the festival and to broaden our global reach. If you have a film you would love to see here in DC, let us know by emailing us at [email protected]. Keep up to date by joining the [email protected] listserv by emailing us at [email protected]. We look forward to seeing you all again next February!
By: Judith Andrews