Words From A Bear
2019 / 90 MIN / USA
N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear examines the enigmatic life and mind of Pulitzer Prize winning author, Navarro Scott Momaday. This profile delves into the psyche behind one of Native America’s most celebrated authors of poetry and prose. Words from a Bear visually captures the essence of Momaday’s writings, relating each written line to his unique Kiowa/American experience representing ancestry, place, and oral history.
N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear is a fresh and distinctive approach to biographical storytelling. Cinematically, this story takes audiences on a spiritual journey through the expansive landscapes of the West, when Momaday’s Kiowa ancestry roamed the Great Plains with herds of buffalo, to the sand- painted valleys of Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico where his imagination ripened and he showed superior writing skills as a young mission student. The biography will give a thorough survey of Momaday’s most
prolific years as a doctorate fellow at Stanford University, his achievement of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1969, and his later works that solidified his place as the founding member of the “Native American Renaissance” in art and literature, influencing a generation of Native American artists, scholars, and political activists.
Although his unique heritage is a central theme of the narrative, Momaday’s work asks the questions every audience can relate to: what are our origins and how do we connect to them through our collective memories? Through his literature and the cinematic visuals, the film will illuminate how Momaday has grappled with these basic questions of human existence and his own identity. The film will reveal the most intimate details of the writer’s personal life as revealed through his literary texts, along with the trials and tribulations he faced as a Native American artist in the twentieth and twenty first century. Historical photos, original animation, and stunning aerials of landscapes, will complement captivating interviews with Robert Redford, Jeff Bridges, Beau Bridges, James Earle Jones, and Joy Harjo, to bring audiences inside the creative core of this American Master.
Screening Saturday, March 28, 7:30 pm
Jeffrey Palmer
Jeffrey Palmer is an Indigenous (Kiowa) filmmaker and media artist. As a Dean's Fellow at the University of Iowa, he received his M.F.A. in Film and Video Production in 2012, with an emphasis in documentary film and video installation. He also received his M.A. in Native American Studies, focusing on Native American exploitation in early cinema and his B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oklahoma. He was a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at the University of Central Oklahoma, and he is currently an Assistant Professor of Transmedia at Syracuse University. His short films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, The Berlinale, Berlin Independent Film Festival, PBS Online Film Festival, Winnipeg Indigenous Film Festival, Maoriland Film Festival, SWAIA Class X Film Festival, Film 2 Farm Aid Film Festival Borneo International Film Festival, INDIANER INUIT: DAS NORDAMERIKA FILM FESTIVAL, deadCENTER Film Festival, imagineNATIVE, ICDOCS, Festival International du Film Ethnographique du Québec (FIFEQ) Annual International Festival of Ethnographic Film. His work has also been featured in Indian Country Today, Native American Times, Art Focus and Dreamcatcher Magazine. He received awards and recognition from the Sundance Institute Creative Producers Award, Sundance Institute Native Program Lab fellowship and Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow. He has received funding from ITVS, The Ford Foundation Just Films, PBS American Masters, and Vision Maker Media. He just completed his directorial feature debut, "N. Scott Momaday: Words From A Bear", which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was nationally televised on the PBS series American Masters in the fall of 2019.