It Starts With a Whisper
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Canada, 1993 (experimental / fiction, 28 minutes, colour)
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| Image: © Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre |
Film Description:
"It Starts With a Whisper was produced in the Six Nations/Brantford area, with an all-Native cast, and features locations on the Grand River which runs through the Six Nations Reserve. The film blends traditional Iroquois imagery, music and themes with motifs from contemporary, secular life. [...] Eighteen-year-old Shanna Sabbath, who has grown up on the Reserve, must now decide what path to follow in life. The choice between traditional and contemporary values seems impossible. She feels all alone, yet she is watched over by ancestral spirits—three 'matriarchal clowns' who sometimes appear in the form of her outrageous aunts: Emily, Molly and Pauline. The aunts take Shanna on a mythic journey to Niagara Falls. [...]"
-- Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre
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| Film Credits (partial): |
| Principal Cast: |
Elijah Harper, Elizabeth Burning, Debra Doxtater, Beverley Miller, Elizabeth Doxtater |
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Notes about It Starts With a Whisper
- Shown at the Festival of Festivals (Toronto) in 1993.
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Quotes about It Starts With a Whisper
"In [Shelley] Niro's narrative It Starts with a Whisper, we see how the city and its media bombardment of Indian stereotypes and bleak statistics isolate Shanna from her family and from her own freedom / responsibility to live her life as a young Tutelo woman."
-- Carol Kalafatic
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"[In It Starts With a Whisper, Shelley] Niro successfully conveys that land has a central place in the imagination of a young, urban First Nations woman but also, that that individual maintains her control over land as a space to be imagined. Land, in other words, is not just the receptacle for the imaginings of non-natives, projecting stereotypes about an indigenous and feminine closeness to the land. Niro, through her characterization of Shanna, seizes control of the landscape as an indigenous space."
-- Elizabeth Claire Kalbfleisch
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"It Starts with a Whisper is filled with vision quests, pleas for understanding and justice, spiritual enlightenment, elegies for Indian tribes who did not survive the last few centuries, and even a cameo from Elijah Harper, appearing in a feathered headdress among the clouds. It is without a doubt the most serious Indian comedy ever made."
-- Paul Chaat Smith
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Bibliography for It Starts With a Whisper
Brief Sections of Dissertations
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Kalbfleisch, Elizabeth Claire. "The Testamental Landscape: Framing Homeland in Alanis Obomsawin's Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance."
In "Bordering on Feminism: Home and Transnational Sites in Recent Visual Culture and Native Women's Art." PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2009. (pp. 102-104)
