Blackroot Premières at Tulalip Film Festival, Wins Top Award and Special Heritage Award
9/21/2014: Last night, Blackroot premiered at the Tulalip Film Festival and was awarded Best Feature Short and Best Overall Film. Our lead, Areal Goodvoice, won the award for Best Acting and we two directors (Jack Flynn & Ben Kadie) received the Heritage Award, "which is given for a significant role in Tulalip or Coast Salish entertainment/ storytelling/cultural sharing. We are sad we couldn't be there in person, but are so grateful that actor Lois Landgrebe was able to receive these awards on behalf of the whole cast and crew! Additional category awards for the film included:
Best Acting, Male: Guito Wingfield
Tulalip Best Acting, Lois Landgrebe
2nd Place, Best Directing
3rd Place, Best Acting Female: Tahna Edwards
The 16-minute Blackroot, set in 1967, tells the story of five young people searching for identity -- racial, gender, and hallucinogenic.
We shot the film around Seattle over our freshman Spring break. (We're TV and Film production students at the University of Southern California.) The production team also includes producer Tyler Brown, a film student at the University of Washington, and cinematographer Sam Wolff, a film student at New York University. (Jack and Sam are from Arizona. Ben and Tyler are from Washington State.)
The film festival is hosted annually by the Hibulb Cultural Center as part of its mission to revive, restore, protect, interpret, collect and enhance the history, traditional cultural values and spiritual beliefs of the Tulalip Tribes who are the successors in interest to the Snohomish, Snoqualmie and Skykomish tribes and other tribes and bands signatory to the Treaty of Point Elliott.
