Mother Tongue Movie Night at CoLang 2022

The Mother Tongue Film Festival is pleased to partner with the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang), hosted by the University of Montana and Chief Dull Knife College, to bring the feature film Sooyii to CoLang. After the screening, the audience can hear from Jesse Asinai’poyi DesRosier, the language coach for the film and who also plays Father. Hali Dardar from the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage will lead the discussion and Q&A on language reclamation and representation in the film.

This free, in-person event is open to the public in the UC 3 Theater at the University of Montana. Doors open at 6:30 pm, and the film starts at 6:50 pm.

Registration is not required to attend the event. Registration does not guarantee entry, and seating will be first come, first served.

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Sooyii (2022, United States, 80 min.)

Dir. Krisztian Kery. In Blackfoot and Shoshone with English subtitles.

In early eighteen-century North America, European invaders made their presence known to most of the Indigenous populations. However, some people in the north have remained untouched. The Pikuni (Blackfeet) Nation are among them. A group of Shoshone Warriors maliciously infect a Pikuni village with smallpox using a trick they learned from European traders: passing on goods that are infected with the virus. To the Pikuni, this new and unseen killer is an unstoppable curse. A young Pikuni man, Older Brother, is strangely spared and struggles to understand why. In a state of hopelessness, he tries to infect himself but then encounters a Shoshone woman fleeing from her white captors. He is faced with a terrible dilemma: protect her or trade her back to her captors to attain the one thing that might give other Pikuni villages a fighting chance?

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Host or Publisher Smithsonian Folklife