Healing and Decolonization

Chapter Five makes a claim for the therapeutic value of Indigenous cinemas by drawing on the body of Indigenous scholarship which conceives of decolonization as healing process. This chapter foregrounds Barry Barclay's theory of Fourth Cinema which emphasizes the centrality of traditional Indigenous values to Indigenous filmmaking, and asks how such values can be affectively embedded in a film for political and therapeutic effect. Kanakan Balintagos’ film Palawan Fate serves as an intercessor for thinking about cinema's contribution to social projects for healing and decolonization across the Fourth World, from Canada to the Philippines and beyond. Keywords: Kanakan Balintagos, Fourth Cinema, Indigenous Cinema, Decolonization “I make films to heal my people.” –Kanakan Balintagos The Soul of Fourth Cinema In a 2002 lecture given at the Auckland University Film and Media Studies department, Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay announced the arrival of Fourth Cinema, a feature-length cinema made by and for Indigenous peoples. At that point in time, eleven Indigenous features had been released worldwide. The canon of Fourth Cinema has now grown and diversified since its relatively recent emergence. When Barclay first spoke of Fourth Cinema, he identified a couple of organizational principles that brought together geographically, culturally and stylistically diverse films. He inferred that Fourth Cinema attested to Indigenous presence and existed outside the national orthodoxy of colonial nation-states. For Barclay, Fourth Cinema at its strongest fundamentally embodies core Indigenous values—values that often clash with those of the colonizer. As he states in his now-seminal lecture, If we as Maori look closely enough and through the right pair of spectacles, we will find examples at every turn of how the old principles have been reworked to give vitality and richness to the way we conceive, develop, manufacture and present our films. […] It seems likely to me that some Indigenous film artists will be interested in shaping films that sit with confidence within the First, Second and Third cinema framework. While not closing the door on that option, others may seek to rework the ancient core values to shape a growing Indigenous cinema outside the national orthodoxy.

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