This spring, MoMA PS1 presents a retrospective of artist, activist, and musician Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki, b. 1932), one of Canada’s most renowned filmmakers. The exhibition spans six decades of her multidisciplinary practice, bringing together a selection of films, sculptures, and sound, as well as rarely seen ephemera that sheds light on their production. The Children Have to Hear Another Story features early works such as Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), a short animated film that depicts the afflictions of residential schools through children’s drawings, as well as prized documentaries like Kanehsatake: 270 years of Resistance (1993), which charts the Mohawk resistance against the expansion of a golf course into sacred burial lands. Tracing her lasting contributions to social change, The Children Have to Hear Another Story brings Obomsawin’s innovative model of Indigenous cinema into focus.
