A Winter Love

In the Q&A for A Winter Love, the director Rhiana Yazzie talked about her experience of starting a small production company that cherishes egalitarian decision-making processes. She learned about the potential of small crews from the feature film Astray (2014). Rhiana convened a very diverse crew that consisted of both indigenous and other people. She found it challenging but also enjoyable the casting as well. She was always scouting for talents among native people. She always tried to balance the decisions that felt good and safe, the decisions desired by the crew members, and conclusions from community consultation. Being aware of the gates shut to native American performing artists and directors, she felt very lucky to have a very passionate crew, who felt that they were doing this for the native people.

With the background of studying theatre, Rhiana faced a shift from working in the theatre to the cinema. Asked why she wanted to do a film instead of a play, she said that while native American people often face a lot of constraints, including limited budget and support, in their creative works, she wanted to make this feature film with these limited resources to reach a relatively large audience. Back then in the theatre, some audience and Rhiana herself felt it is a pity that the theatre could only accommodate several people, and a play could only exist for a certain amount of time; cinema, on the other hand, may have a deeper, longer effect.

Rhiana was aware that native people are particularly not allowed to make mistakes, and it was hard to resist the pressure to play the “nativeness” fantasized by the majority. The native American tribes are never officially recognized by the state, but they are nations inside nations, which are negotiating their relations with the state and also among themselves. In A Winter Love, Rhiana uses various tribal languages to mark the different locations. She wants to show the intersection of urban spaces and tribes and highlight the tribal differences therein: the main characters are Navajo, whose homes are in the desert, but the film happens in Minnesota, where there are forests and snow. The film also works against colorism. It casts a Nakoda guy that does not look like one, whose friends are white, who refuses to explain anything. Essentially it is the world view that matters: the Navajo world view sees a basic family unit as a parent and child, not a man and a woman; it sees things as cocreated, rather than having a single creator like in Christian religion. Native audiences may see a lot of “corners” of the film that other audiences may ignore.