Over the 2024 awards season, Native film fans had Lily Gladstone walking the red carpet, and this year it was Sugarcane co-directors Julian Brave NoiseCat (Secwepemc) and Emily Kassie receiving multiple nominations from various groups (Williams Lake First Nation Chief Willie Sellars walked—and danced—the Oscars red carpet alongside the pair).

The film lost out on Best Documentary Feature to No Other Land, but another piece was chipped away on the “Native ceiling” as Indigenous presence became more the norm, not the exception (we loved the Native land acknowledgment on the red carpet as well, Academy).

Across the Pacific, a message from Oscar winner Sean Baker (Anora) has resonated with audiences packing cinemas to see the new Samoan-made Native film Tinā. In one of his Oscar acceptance speeches, Baker highlighted the importance of the communal experience of watching movies in a theater, especially in a world that can feel divided. To my mind, no other feature so far this year better reflects this spirit than Tinā.

The film is a classic fish-out-of-water story of a teacher who swoops in to save the school, except this time our hero is brown (Samoan, to be specific), not white, and the school is wealthy and privileged, not run-down and crime-ridden. What the Samoan school teacher, played by the ebullient Anapela Polataivao, brings is heart and soul, imbued with hope and healing through music: be it classical, modern or traditional Samoan.

I saw Tinā on opening night at my local Gaiety cinema in Wairoa, and the entire audience was sobbing by the end (don’t forget your tissues). I loved the film, but was puzzled by one thing: is it okay, in 2025, for a story to be centered around one brown person in a school that is largely white? I went to Letterboxd reviews and discovered, yes, it can work.

like Coscarcon, who saw the film at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, with a largely Samoan audience, speak specifically to this particular topic. They write: “There is a dynamic that smacks of cultural appropriation in the film as a mostly white choir of privileged school kids sing Samoan songs in a competition, but experiencing the Samoan reaction to the story and hearing the director (also Samoan) talk about this as an attempt at healing in society gets you thinking that maybe we get offended on behalf of others a bit too easily.”

Tinā is in general release in New Zealand and the Pacific, with a May release set for Australia. To date, the film has brought in over $2 million NZD at the box office, placing it firmly in that nation’s top ten of all-time homegrown features and bringing audiences back to cinemas in droves (including our very own former editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood).

In the picture, Iida, an elderly Sámi woman, returns home and is flooded with memories of her traditional tribal childhood, after a lifetime of forced Finnishization. The film is haunting, with stunning black-and-white cinematography and a mesmeric soundtrack. The work is deeply personal to Gauriloff, she told me last year at the Tribeca Film Festival. “The inspiration for my film came from my mother. She couldn’t the Skolt Sámi language, our Native language, to me,” she explained. “But she told me stories about her life, her childhood, her grandparents. For all my life, I have been collecting these stories, in my heart.”

She added: “This forced assimilation and transgenerational trauma, it still has a big effect, on both my generation but also the younger one. We are struggling to teach the language to our children, and it’s not easy.”

Madhukar caught Je’vida at this year’s Bengaluru International Film Festival, calling it “[an] insightful portrayal of Sámi people, their culture and their oppression.” When I watched the film, I was touched by its magical realist qualities, and shared that with Gauriloff. “My great-grandmother was the oral storyteller, a very well-known healer,” she told me. “My film Kaisa’s Enchanted Forest is about her life before the war. It was a documentary hybrid, made with 60mm archive material. I fell in love with that so much that I wanted to create something similar.”

I asked Gauriloff whether she still feels her ancestors when she goes home. “Yes, and I actually think they are with me here now.” There is a wealth of great Sámi feature films out there, and Je’vida is certainly a fine addition.

Hot off the heels of Birriranga, the opening night film of Māoriland Film Festival in New Zealand was Kōkā by Kath Akuhata-Brown (Ngāti Porou), whose wish was to put a Māori worldview front and center of the screen, in this female-focused project. In the feature, a Māori elder and a local delinquent form an unlikely bond on a road trip. As they confront past traumas and each face their own demons, their shared path becomes a journey of healing, community and reconciliation.

Kōkā is the first feature to use the original dialect of East Cape iwi (tribe) Ngāti Porou. It screened alongside numerous other Māori works at Māoriland, which encomes global Indigenous cinema. Audiences across New Zealand can see Kōkā when it is released nationwide in June, timed to coincide with the nation’s new Māori-themed holiday, Matariki.

The Letterboxd reviews are in, and we’re loving them. “I have absolutely no fucking idea what I just watched….. but I think I liked it,” says A Clockwork Cody. “Super duper psychologically messed up in the best way possible. A blistering and unflinchingly harsh plea to not be forgotten,” writes Cam. Though the story is largely Anglo both in source (esteemed NZ author Owen Marshall) and characters, there are two strong ing turns by veteran Polynesian actors George Henare (Māori) and Nathaniel Lees (Samoan).

Ashcroft isn’t resting on his laurels: he’s currently set to direct Robert De Niro in The Whisper Man for Netflix. Another one for the watchlists.

Running is a ‘profound act’ for Ku Stevens, a young activist who uses his rising fame as a long-distance runner to the stolen generations taken to Native boarding schools, kids who literally had to run away if they had any hope of true freedom. Stevens’ own grandfather had to run 50 miles on foot to escape, and it is this distance that the athlete honors in his remembrance run.

The heady mix of sports and politics is the focus of Remaining Native, a new documentary having just received its world premiere at SXSW.  I spoke with director Paige Bethmann, a Haudenosaunee Native, just prior to the film’s opening. “I was working in New York City for Vox Media when the news broke of the 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children in Canada,” Bethmann says. “I was noticing a lot of the reactions, some people being completely unaware, and people in my own community starting to share stories of their experiences, including my family. I was really reminded of the story of my great-grandmother.”

“A friend of mine ended up sharing an article about Ku and I was really moved,“ she continues, “So I ended up reaching out to his mom, who was organizing the remembrance run, asking if I could come out to film. She invited me and a small crew, and we met Ku. I ended up moving out here to Reno, to follow him around for three years.”

At SXSW, Bethmann reached out to local Indigenous people and the running community. “We’ve organized a 5k run in partnership with Nike to be able to run all together, bringing the Austin powwow committee, as well as all these running clubs, to come and run with Ku and his family, and almost replicate the remembrance run.” Nike has a Native program ing Indigenous initiatives called Nike N7, making real engagement with Native peoples through sport.

The first reviews are out, including from Jon: “An absolutely fantastic documentary, with a very heavy and impactful message of a young man who won’t let the trauma of his past generations dictate who he can be, while also respecting and loving his culture and community.”

The film got a rousing reception at its premiere. “If you want to experience something real but strange at the same time you get it all in this unique package,” writes Michael. “A revelatory experience. The mysticism is the texture between the frames, we get a particular school of magic specific to the community he comes from but singular also in the way in which he delivers.”

With a world in flux, it is heartening that Indigenous storytellers are continuing to tell their stories their own way. Indigenous gatherings like Birriranga and Māoriland are safe and sacred spaces for Natives to share their stories with like-minded audiences, while A-list festivals such as Berlinale are uplifted by amazing new works for audiences to discover and share around the world. Long may this continue: Native Now!