Alanis Obomsawin is amazing. At the age of eighty-six, the Abenaki activist documentarian is still making films at a prolific rate. Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger is the latest chapter in her storied career, one that continues to craft powerful activist works.
Jordan River Anderson returns to similar territory in Obomsawin’s recent work, whereby Obomsawin focuses on impending court tribunals regarding impoprietous care for First Nations communities from the Canadian Government. Specifically, Obomsawin takes aim at Federal mismanagement of Indigenous health care in the wake of “Jordan’s Principle,” a policy designed to ensure Aboriginal children with special needs are afforded adequate care. For the most part, these “bare-minimum” ambitions have not been met, and this film explicitly aims to interrogate not only “why,” but also, “how to move forward.”
This is vintage Obomsawin; deeply political, and simultaneously deeply felt. She continues to have a knack for knowing exactly how to prod the audience into asking the right questions. One such instance, features the plight of a family whose access to care was denied because they lived on a reservation. The backwardness of such a ruling peculiarly strikes the viewer as being definitively unjust. During the legal proceedings, one man makes the point that a labyrinthian system of bureaucracy can become so large that it becomes inherently oppressive. No statement better articulates the thesis of Jordan River Anderson. This, the latest from a master documentarian, is another in a long line of hard-hitting, activist films.
- Release Date: 9/9/2019
