Lectures and Talks
Film Screening: I Am Ishi: The Performance Art Film
Sat Jun 21, 2025 | 7 PM - 9 PM
The Cinematheque | 1131 Howe Street
Film still from I Am Ishi: The Performance Art Film, 2023, Courtesy of the Artists
Directed by acclaimed visual artist Dana Claxton (Hunkpapa Lakota) and produced by the Ishi Collective, this uncanny, experimental feature-length work serves as both document and expansion of a performance piece by James Luna (Payómkawichum/ Ipai/ Mexican), whose seminal Artifact Piece broke new ground for Indigenous art in the 1980s. The film, like Luna’s 2015–17 touring project, draws from the life of Ishi, last survivor of the Yahi people, who became a “living specimen” at a University of California museum following his 1911 appearance in Oroville, California.
I Am Ishi intercuts and overlays a recording of Luna’s live performance with original material conceived by the Collective. In Claxton’s most striking filmic device, cycles of superimposed image and sound play in reverse—a suitably destabilizing effect for the subjugation of a man made into an anthropological attraction.
Eerie and unsettling, I Am Ishi confronts the dehumanizing legacy of colonial institutions and their abhorrent, academic practices.
The Ishi Collective is Dana Claxton, Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwich’in), Heather Haynes and the late James Luna (1950–2018).
Admission to this film screening is free and will take place at The Cinematheque, 1131 Howe Street in Vancouver.
Please note that unclaimed tickets for complimentary screenings at The Cinematheque will be released 15 minutes before showtime. Please arrive early to guarantee your seat.