Photographer Michael Greenlar will host a film screening of Cree Hunters of Mistassini.

Cree Hunters of Mistassini is an award winning documentary film from 1974 that follows a group of three Cree families from the Mistassini region of Quebec, as they set up a winter hunting camp near James Bay and Ungava Bay.  The film draws parallels to the lives of those documented in Michael Greenlar’s exhibition “Kokom Lena of the First Nation Algonquin.”

For thousands of years, the Cree Indians of James Bay inhabited the northern Quebec forests – originally gathering wild rice, and later hunting, fishing, and trapping. Traditionally, small groups of families spent the winter months together in the bush, subsisting on moose, beaver, deer, wild geese and caribou.

Filmmakers, Boyce Richardson and Tony Ianzelo traveled to Mistassini to speak with Cree friends, pledging that their film would allow Native people to tell their own stories, and filming went ahead with three hunting families in the bush, over five months from 1972 to 1973.

Produced by the National Film Board of Canada Cree Hunters of Mistassini received the award for Best Documentary at the Canadian Film Awards as well as the Robert Flaherty Award for best one-off documentary from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Screened with permission from the National Film Board of Canada.