The Zotigh Singers give ceremonial drum blessing through the 2023 Mom Tongue Movie Pageant. They may do the identical throughout this yr’s pageant. {Photograph} by Grace Bowie.
Joshua Bell, a curator on the Smithsonian Establishment’s Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past, says that many individuals nonetheless think about monolingualism to be the norm. He and his crew hope to dispel that fantasy within the Mom Tongue Movie Pageant.
Co-directed by Bell and Amalia Córdova, a curator on the Smithsonian’s Middle for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Mom Tongue’s tenth annual pageant will begin on Thursday, February 20, on the Nationwide Museum of the American Indian. The 23-film lineup will function greater than 25 completely different Indigenous languages from internationally, together with Hawai’i, Canada, Wales, and New Zealand.
Córdova hopes that audiences will discover the movies academic—in regards to the previous, current, and future of those world languages—in addition to entertaining. “Whereas folks may consider a movie pageant with actually lengthy, aesthetically pleasing fiction movies, we’ve strayed far-off from that,” she says. “We need to worth language as what’s pushing the filmmaking course of alongside.”
The tradition and historical past of language, Bell and Córdova say, will at all times be the central tenet of Mom Tongue. They argue that studying about worldwide languages is an train in empathy. “Everybody has a mom tongue, and everybody comes from completely different locations,” Bell says. “We need to present folks with the chance to search out that frequent floor.”
Among the many closing record of movies that Bell and Córdova have chosen, a course of throughout which Bell says they “had a tough time saying ‘no,’” is a Canadian documentary about buffalo consciousness, a Norwegian quick with a reindeer herder because the romantic lead, and a Mozambican feature-length movie that features reenactments of the nation’s civil struggle. Many of those showings will probably be punctuated with question-and-answer classes, panel discussions, and performances.
“These performances actually join teams that need to enter into the Smithsonian with delight,” Córdova says. “It refreshes a bunch of neighborhood relationships.”
Due to the pandemic, Mom Tongue programming was fully digital in 2021, and it didn’t return to in-person till 2023. (Its 2020 version was held the month earlier than Covid shut down on a regular basis life in DC.) This yr, the pageant will convey again some on-line parts—friends who can’t make it to in-person occasions by means of Sunday, February 23, can tune into free, digital screenings of further movies by means of Saturday, March 1. “After we got here again in individual, we acquired loads of flak that we weren’t on-line. It reminded us that there’s an actual curiosity and starvation for this,” Bell says. “Hopefully, the six days of digital will fulfill these non-DC-based audiences.”
As Bell and Córdova put together for opening evening, they look ahead to celebrating the pageant’s decennial—and to encouraging viewers to proceed studying about Indigenous geography, tradition, and artistry. The movie pageant is admittedly an invite to chortle, to cry, and to simply be immersed in numerous worlds that these movies painting,” Bell says. “It’s a outstanding alternative.”
For extra details about the Mom Tongue Movie Pageant and to browse the 2025 schedule, refer right here.
