Navajo Talking Picture

1985

40min

Film student Arlene Bowman (Navajo) travels to the Reservation to document the traditional ways of her grandmother. The filmmaking persists in spite of her grandmother's forceful objections to this invasion of her privacy. Ultimately, what emerges is a work which abruptly calls into question issues of "insider/outsider" status in a portrait of an assimilated Navajo struggling to use a "white man's" medium to capture the remnants of her cultural past.