Native Features

Book excerpt: The first edition of Native Features, published in 2008, was the world's first book-length study of the nearly fifty feature films that had then been made under the artistic supervision of Indigenous people. Now, just seven years later, the number of Indigenous features has nearly doubled. It took over fifty years to produce the first fifty Indigenous films but less than ten years to produce a second fifty. Fiction feature films made by Indigenous people are fast becoming one of the world's newest growing categories of cinema. Maintaining the book's accessible style and three-part structure, Christal Whelan joins Houston Wood to cover a wider range of regions - Africa, South/Central America, Asia - to make essential comparisons of cross-regional trends in film production and aesthetics. The authors include a glossary, a timeline and discussion questions to help students reflect upon the impact that this explosion of new Indigenous films is having both on its communities of origin and in world cinema.