Where and how do we find balance? To create balance is to connect the many branches of our existence, and to connect is to reach an enduring harmony. In 2024, the Mother Tongue Film Festival showcased films that record personal journeys and explore the drive to find balance and harmony within our world, communities, families, and selves.
Films marked with below are available to stream in full on our website after the festival.
Stories of loss, revelation, and recovery can lead us on the path to restoring a sense of wholeness. In this program, youth confront generational trauma and seek to break through for a brighter future. Following the screening, stay for a Q&A with director Xun Sero.
This program is presented with support from the Embassy of Mexico in the United States and the Mexican Cultural Institute of Washington, DC.
As a result of colonization, much Indigenous knowledge was destroyed or extracted, with many sacred objects finding their way to museums overseas. How can Indigenous scholars and communities reclaim their patrimony and reconnect with the knowledges embedded in their objects? We’ll explore questions of return and reclamation in this film and the Q&A that follows with the director and Ñuu Savi cultural experts.
We invite you on a poignant journey through identity and cultural revival. These films paint a vivid portrait of the struggles and triumphs in reclaiming Indigenous languages. Grape Soda in the Parking Lot and ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak) each uniquely testify to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of erasure, highlighting the vital role language plays in connecting us to our past, present, and future. Join us for an evening screening that reflects on and celebrates the power of memory and words to create change.
This program is presented in collaboration with Planet Word.
In this program, two films intersect at the crossroads of love and resistance. Aikāne and Y SŴN illustrate the spiritual connections that can be formed and the cultural ties that can be broken in the fight against political repression. Though artistically varied, both display the transformative power of commitment, be it to a person or a cause, iterating the fight for identity as a universal narrative. Join this evening screening, followed by a Q&A, and celebrate the indomitable spirit of humanity in its many facets.
This program is presented in collaboration with Planet Word and with support from the Welsh Government in DC.
These collected shorts from around the world explore different dimensions of finding sustenance—whether through connecting to place and kin, cooking and eating food, or different forms of artistic expression. Evoking the many dimensions and transformations in these ongoing practices, these films reveal the various ways humans connect to their world. Stay after the films for a Q&A with attending directors.
Nüshu, a clandestine language created and used solely by Yao women in Hunan Province, offers a unique legacy that unites its practitioners. Delving into the lives of women in modern China bound by the once-secret script, Hidden Letters is a poignant exploration of female bonds and the generational echoes of gendered oppression in China. The documentary artfully portrays two women’s journeys as they grapple with the complexities of independence and traditional expectations that both define and confine them. Join us for this inspiring screening followed by a Q&A with director Violet Du Feng, diving deeper into Nüshu’s enduring legacy.
What lengths would you go to keep your family together? Inspired by real-life events, The Wind & the Reckoning explores Native Hawaiians’ stand against government-mandated exile due to leprosy. This film is a powerful statement about the dynamics of resistance and is a point of reflection on the dislocation caused by disease and settler-colonialism in Hawai‘i. Stay after the film for a discussion with Smithsonian curator Halena Kapuni-Reynolds.
Join us for a ceremonial drum blessing closing out our festival, leading into our final film screenings. How does one find balance in the wake of disruptive events? We explore this process through two films that use humor and empathy to make sense of the experience of colonialism and survivance. Each film is a multilayered exploration of the power of telling and retelling stories as a way of finding balance.
The Mother Tongue Film Festival is a public program of Recovering Voices, a collaboration between Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and the Asian Pacific American Center. Find related resources through Folklife’s Mother Tongue Media and Language Vitality Initiative.
This program received federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the National Museum of the American Latino.
This program also received support from Arenet, the Embassy of Australia in Washington DC, the Embassy of Mexico in the United States, Ferring Pharmaceuticals, the Mexican Cultural Institute of Washington DC, New Zealand Embassy to the United States of America, Planet Word, the Welsh Government in DC, and The Elizabeth and Whitney MacMillan Endowment.
Billy Luther (Navajo, Hopi, Laguna Pueblo)
United States
English, Navajo
2023
83 min.
Drama
Content warning: For mature audiences. Contains coarse language.
Two adolescent Navajo cousins from different worlds bond during a summer herding sheep on their grandmother’s ranch in Arizona, learning more about their family’s past and themselves.
D. Wilmos Paul
United States
English, French
2022
16 min.
Drama
Junior, an African teenager ashamed of his accent, enrolls in a creative writing club hoping he can make it through the semester without speaking… until he’s faced with his worst fear.
Xun Sero (Maya Tzotzil)
Mexico
Spanish, Tzotzil
2022
80 min.
Documentary
Content warning: For mature audiences.
In this deeply moving dialogue between a mother and son, Tzotzil director Xun Sero confronts his past with honesty, understanding, and forgiveness.
Omar Aguilar Sánchez
Mixteca (Oaxaca, Mexico)
Sa’an Savi / Tu’un Savi (Language of the Rain or Mixtec), Spanish
2022
45 min.
Documentary
The Ñii Ñu’u, or sacred books, are codices that contain the history and worldview of the Ñuu Savi (People of the Rain, or Mixtec people). Today, none of the surviving Mixtec codices are in the hands of the community. After 500 years, director and scholar Omar Aguilar Sánchez has interpreted the codices based on the knowledge of his own language and culture, teaching communities how to read the codices, offering workshops, and recreating the pictorial writing to support their identity, with practical implications for the community in the creation of an official logo.
Kymon Greyhorse (Diné, Tongan)
United States
English, Diné
2022
3 min.
Experimental
This poetic memoir is a love letter that speaks of introspection and what it means to rediscover who you are and cherish where you come from.
Francisco Huichaqueo (Mapuche)
Wallmapu (Chile)
Mapuzungún, Spanish
2022
62 min.
Documentary
Mapuche and Chileans have always been in conflict. So how will they live together? First, by getting to know each other. Once the field is leveled, a conversation can begin. This film presents a crisp portrait of the process behind an architectural structure that aims to start a conversation.
Megan Kyak-Monteith (Inuk), Taqralik Partridge (Inuk)
Canada
English, French, Inuktitut
2023
8 min.
Animation
What if every language that had been lost to English—every word, every syllable—grew up out of the ground in flowers? The Scottish Gaelic of Taqralik Partridge’s grandmother and the Inuktitut of her father unfold in memories of her family, of pain, and of love.
ᎤᎶᎩᎳ/Schon Duncan (United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee), Michael McDermit
Oklahoma and North Carolina, United States
Cherokee, English
2023
94 min.
Documentary
The Cherokee language is deeply tied to Cherokee identity, yet generations of assimilation efforts by the U.S. government and anti-Indigenous stigmas have forced the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes to declare a state of emergency for the language in 2019. While there are 430,000 Cherokee citizens in the three federally recognized tribes, fewer than an estimated 1,500 fluent speakers remain—the majority of whom are elderly. The COVID pandemic has unfortunately hastened the course. Language activists, artists, and youth now lead efforts to use and hear Cherokee again in daily life.
Daniel Sousa, Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson
Hawai‘i
None (silent)
2023
14 min.
Animation
A valiant island warrior, wounded in battle against foreign invaders, falls into a mysterious underwater world. Everything changes when the octopus who rescues him transforms into a handsome young man.
Lee Haven Jones
Swansea and Penarth, Wales
Welsh, English
2023
89 min.
Drama
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher swept to power in 1979 with a manifesto that promised to establish a Welsh-language television channel. Months into her premiership, she reneged on her promise and sparked protests in Wales. Against a backdrop of civil disobedience, the iconic politician Gwynfor Evans vows to starve to death unless the government changes course. In Y SŴN, one of the most colorful chapters of modern Welsh history is told in an imaginative and unique style.
Vincent L’Herault, Time Anaviapik Soucie (Inuit)
Canada
Inuktitut
2021
28 min.
Documentary
Tim is a young father living in Pond Inlet, Nunavut. As his grandfather did before, he wants to start his own study of water quality to benefit his community. Tim embarks on an inspiring research journey that will lead to empowerment and cultural revitalization. The experience becomes an awakening for Tim and his team, harboring a wind of change and adaptation for this community of the Canadian Arctic.
Matthew Raj Webb, Ihaab Syed, Rohan Sengupta
India
Bengali, Hindi
2024
11 min.
Documentary
This audiovisual portrait of hereditary artist and urban chronicler Bhaskar Chitrakar explores his painting style that reimagines a centuries-old, mixed-media tradition of religious idol representation at Kolkata’s Kalighat temple.
Serena Mosquito (Euchee)
United States
Euchee (Yuchi)
2023
2 min.
Documentary
Bring your appetite for learning and get ready to blend up some fun! Serena Mosquito whips up a smoothie while speaking in Euchee, a linguistically distinct language spoken in Oklahoma. Equal parts humor and culinary delight, this student film is as charming as it is educational, yielding a heartwarming cultural tribute.
Mariah Hernandez-Fitch (Houma)
United States
Houma, English, French
2023
9 min.
Drama
While learning to make gumbo from her grandparents, Mariah Fernandez-Fitch draws out their personal stories as a way to honor and preserve their Indigenous history and life.
Rosa Vieira
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Kiyombe, Kongo, Lingala
2023
19 min.
Documentary
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, palm wine tapsters play a key role in Yoómbe village life. Palm wine is an alcoholic beverage, drawn from the top of the oil palm, associated with the ancestors. Limber climbers extract this ancient drink to share among family, friends, and guests.
Jefferson Stein
United States
English, Spanish
2021
15 min.
Drama
Set in southern Arizona, twenty miles from the Mexico border in the Tohono O’odham Nation, a six-year-old Indigenous girl (Amaya Juan) discovers a Hispanic migrant her age who has lost her father while traveling through the tribal lands into the United States.
Emilie Upczak
United States
English, Navajo
2022
10 min.
Drama
A botanist grieving the death of a beloved aunt travels alone to northern Mexico, where she is nourished by images of the last trip they took together, traversing the Colorado River.
Eduardo Liron, Renata Mattar
Brazil
Brazilian Portuguese
2023
16 min.
Documentary
In Serra Preta of Bahia, a region of northeast Brazil with a distinctive dialect, the families of rural workers keep the tradition of work songs alive. They cultivate corn in traditional ways and come together in a joint effort throughout all stages of cultivation, including pounding the corn. Each step in the process has songs, rhythms, and festivities that emerge to manage and brighten the work process.
Pat-i Kayapó (Mêbêngôkre-Kayapó), Paul Chilsen
Brazil
Mêbêngôkre
2023
15 min.
Drama
Mêbêngôkre-Kayapó youth and elders reenact the story of how agriculture was brought from the heavens to their community. The Mêbêngôkre-Kayapó people live along the Xingu River in northwest Brazil, amid more than 27 million acres of rainforest. The film is the first narrative video project by the community of A’Ukre, created in collaboration with elders and the Mêbêngôkre filmmaking collective.
Violet Du Feng, Qing Zhao
China
Mandarin
2022
89 min.
Documentary
Watch the bonds of sisterhood—and the parallel struggles among generations of women in China—that are drawn together by the once-secret written language of Nüshu, the only script designed and used exclusively by women. Two millennials try to balance their lives as independent women in modern China while confronting the traditional identity that defines but also oppresses them.
David L. Cunningham
Hawai‘i
English, ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i
2022
94 min.
Drama
As an outbreak of leprosy engulfs nineteenth-century colonial Hawai‘i, a small group of infected Native Hawaiians resist government-mandated exile, taking a courageous stand against the provisional government.
Terril Calder (Métis)
Canada
Cree, English, French
2023
6 min.
Animation
At Aunty Gladys’s funeral, Archer Pechawis heard a tap on the window. It was a bear named Jesus, and Jesus had come for Archer’s mom. Now she’s no longer recognizable—while Jesus hangs out in the shed.
Beck Cole (Luritja), Dena Curtis (Warrumungu/Warlpiri), Tracey Rigney (Wotjobaluk/Ngarrindjeri), Danielle MacLean (Warumungu/Luritja), Tim Worrall (Ngai Tuhoe), Renae Maihi (Ngati Whakaue/Ngapuhi), Miki Magasiva (Samoan), Mario Gaoa (Samoan), Richard Curtis (Ngati Rongomai/Ngati Pikiao), Chantelle Burgoyne (Samoan)
Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Arrente, English, Māori, Samoan, Turkish
2022
90 min.
Drama
Ten leading Indigenous filmmakers from Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the South Pacific craft a compellingly original and insightful anthology film in response to the 250th anniversary of a historically celebrated colonizer’s invasion of their lands.
