TIFF 2013 Review: Hi-Ho Mistahey! (2013)

Director: Alanis Obomsawin
Country: Canada
Genre: Documentary
Official Clip: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. For more information on the festival visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.

There’s always a delicate balancing act, when making a documentary to raise awareness of an issue, between proselytizing and filmmaking. The sort of director who is passionate enough about the issue to dedicate the time and resources to document it often loses sight of a lot of other things along the way. Sometimes the director loses objectivity, sometimes they lose focus, and occasionally they lose sight of the dual goals of a documentary: informing and entertaining. Writer-director Alanis Obomsawin is a maddeningly prolific documentarian, directing 30 films over the last 38 years for Canada’s National Film Board. Obomsawin’s work focuses on issues affecting Aboriginal people in Canada, and has greatly contributed to awareness of the issues she documents. But in Hi-Ho Mistahey!, she loses sight of the film she’s making, so consuming is her passion for her subject.

Obomsawin’s work focuses on issues affecting Aboriginal people in Canada, and has greatly contributed to awareness of the issues she documents. But in Hi-Ho Mistahey!, she loses sight of the film she’s making, so consuming is her passion for her subject.

The film focuses on a First Nations advocacy group struggling to get a school built in a rural, desperately underserved district. The organization sprang up in the wake of the tragic death of education activist Shannen Koostachin, who was killed in a car accident at 16, and the film documents both her efforts and the efforts she inspired to bring attention to the desperate educational need of children in her area. The group, which has minor political backing from a dedicated MP, and is largely shepherded by a friend of Shannen’s who lacks her charisma and public speaking ability but retains her passionate commitment, takes the issue all the way to Geneva, where they speak to the United Nations in an effort to shame their government into action on an international scale.

The story the film tells is by turns inspiring and tragic, populated by people fighting to transcend their circumstances, and some who have been defeated by the system that has disserved them. It’s a moving story, rendered in a detached and occasionally dispassionate way that often undercuts the power of what we are watching unfold. Hi-Ho Mistahey! is less a film than an occasionally impressive piece of journalism. The issues it examines are of vital importance, but the director’s passion for the subject does not translate into passionate filmmaking. That she’s there with a camera on is often supposed to be enough. Sometimes it is, but at other times, the film we are watching feels like an after-thought, a by-product of Obomsawin’s engagement with the issue at hand, rendered in cinema largely because of her profession. Film is the medium Obomsawin chose to tell this story, but beyond that it doesn’t seem particularly important to her process. Hi-Ho Mistahey! would probably be an equally rewarding piece of art if it had been presented as a podcast.

There is often an utter lack of visual imagination to the film, which is surprising considering how powerful the story it documents can be.

There is often an utter lack of visual imagination to the film, which is surprising considering how powerful the story it documents can be. Obamsawin sweeps across vast expanses of landscape as if she left he camera on and pointed towards the ground during a helicopter flight, and her static shots of nature, while often breathtaking, feel similarly tossed off. Obamsawin clearly knows this area well, but the film possesses neither her familiarity with the terrain nor the sense of wonder we should feel seeing it for the first time. There are exceptions to this, though. A sequence in which Shannon’s older sister recounts a dream where the deceased visited her is beautiful, as the film drifts away from its standard talking-head set up for a more expressive rendition of what we are hearing. Occasional moments like this reveal Obamsawin isn’t without artistry, she is just not particularly concerned with the way she presents the information. The story is intended to take center stage, and when a particularly great speech is being given or a revealing interview grants us insight into life for these people, it does. Too often, though, the fact of the film distracts from the facts it depicts.

Educating children is one of the most powerful and vital responsibilities a government undertakes. Every child is a blank slate society has the chance to make great, but for many First Nations children, this opportunity is being woefully squandered. Hi-Ho Mistahey! calls attention to its issue by the fact of its existence, its just unfortunate the exclamation point of the title doesn’t ever seem to translate into the film that bears it. The power is in the story, but the film never consistently manages to harness or express it for viewers.

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Jordan Ferguson

Staff Film Critic

Jordan Ferguson is a lifelong pop culture fan, and would probably never leave his couch if he could get away with it. When he isn’t wasting time “studying the law” at the University of Michigan, he writes about film, television, and music. In addition to writing for Next Projection, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Review To Be Named, a homemade haven for pop-culture obsessives. Check out more of his work at Reviewtobenamed.com , follow him on twitter @bobchanning, or just yell really loudly on the street. Don’t worry, he’ll hear.

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