Indigenous Film Festival
Film Title: Honey Moccasin
Director: Shelley Niro
Length: 47 minutes



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Description

in this all-American Indian 1998 production, Mohawk artist and director Shelley Niro explores American Indian identity in the 1990's. This film is part of the smoke signals new wave of films that examine native identity in the 1990's. Set on the Grand Pine Indian Reservation, aka "Reservation X", Honey Moccasin combines elements of melodrama, performance art, cable access, and 'whodunit' to question conventions of ethnic and sexual identity as well as film narrative.

Honey Moccasin won recent awards at both the Red Earth Festival in Oklahoma City and the Dreamspeakers Festival 1998 in Edmonton, Alberta. The film combines melodrama, performance art and cable access to question American Indian ethnic identity. This narrative is an investigation of authenticity, cultural identity and modern pop culture. As the screenwriter, director, and producer of her latest film Honey Moccasin, Niro utilized the framework of storytelling and collective memory with an emphasis on humor.

A comedy/thriller complete with a fashion show and torchy musical numbers, this witty film employs a surreal pastiche of styles to depict the rivalry between bars the smokin' moccasin and the Inukshuk Cafe, the saga of closeted drag queen/powwow clothing thief Zachary John, and the travails of crusading investigator Honey Moccasin. this irreverent reappropriation of familiar narrative strategies serves as a provocative spring-board for an investigation of authenticity, cultural identity, and the articulation of modern American Indian experience in cinematic language and pop culture.

Biography on Shelly Niro

Niro is a filmmaker, painter, photographer and writer who has exhibited her work in Canada and the United States. born in Niagara Falls, New York, Shelley Niro is a member of the Mohawk Nation, Iroquois Confederacy, Turtle Clan, Six Nations Reserve.

in 1992 Niro co-produced, along with Anna Gronau, "It Starts With A Whisper", a short bestowing several awards. In conjunction with her visual arts awards, Niro was a fellow at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute (1997) and was acclaimed by the the New York State Historical Association for her exhibit, "Where We Stand", contemporary haudenosaunee artists.

Recently completing a Masters of Fine Art at the University of Western Ontario, Niro's thesis contended with the re-discovery and re-addressing of basic myths, legends and history of the Iroquois people. Her research resulted in an intensive study of the diaspora of the Mohawk nation. Teacher, photographer, painter, and filmmaker Shelley Niro trained in Durham College's Graphics Programme in Oshawa, Ontario (1978) and at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. Her work is consistently innovative, both in terms of its use of the photographic medium (hand-tinting, matte boards, and diptychs or triptychs) and its critical re-presentation of stereotypical images of First Nations people in general, and women in particular. Frequently utilizing strategies of masquerade, parody and appropriation, with herself or family members and friends as models, Niro's work is significant for its subversion and re-creation of new identities and images in counterpoint to the long and damaging history of white representation of Native peoples.

Niro continues to serve on juries, panels, and committees. She is currently writing a new screenplay, kissed by lightning.

Film Credits

Director - Shelley Niro
Producers - Lynn Hutchison, Shelley Niro
Editor - Sarah Peddie
Writer - Shelley Niro
Director of Photography - Marcos Arriaga