NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release

Contact: Ollie Reed Jr. (505) 345-2872 x 26; oreedjr@gmail.com

TRAINING PROGRAM FOR EMERGING NATIVE AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHTS AND FILMMAKERS CONTINUES SECOND YEAR WITH WORLD PREMIERE OF FILM ON BORDER TENSION

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M._Sept. 26, 2009_Byron Johns has two choices when a young illegal immigrant couple with a baby stumbles on his corn field in Southern Arizona—help them cross the border at the Pima Reservation or shoo them away. When Minute men show up to take matters of national security into their own hands, Byron Johns knows he did the right thing.

The VSA North Fourth Art Center, Creative Spirit New Mexico and Southern California Indian Center present the world premiere of Indios Primeros at 8 p.m. Oct. 9 at the North Fourth Art Center. Indios Primeros is emerging screenwriter Roberto A. Jackson’s tale of Byron Johns, a good-hearted Native American ne’er do well who faces a pivotal moment in a pair of immigrants’ lives. The two worlds of Native Americans and Mexican immigrants find common ground before a showdown with vigilante border guards.

Indios Primeros was selected among 24 screenplays submitted by Native writers. Jackson, a screenwriter and photographer, is a member of Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community and a reporter for the Gila River Indian News. He is also part Hispanic and drew on his own diverse background to write about the coming together of Native American and Mexican cultures in Indios Primeros.

The movie is a co-production of Creative Spirit New Mexico and the Southern California Indian Center. The screening of Jackson’s short film will be accompanied by a program of film shorts by other Native American filmmakers.

North Fourth’s Two Worlds program was co-founded by Marjorie Neset, executive director of the VSA North Fourth Art Center, and James Lujan, a filmmaker and playwright from Taos Pueblo. Established in 2006, the Two Worlds program theme is rooted in the struggle faced by many in American Indian and indigenous communities—modern modes vs. traditional ways, urban life vs. life on the reservation, the earthly vs. the spiritual.

Lujan’s work at Southern California Indian Center’s InterTribal Entertainment was the inspiration for the creation in 2008 of Creative Spirit New Mexico, a film production and training initiative of VSA North Fourth Art Center. Creative Spirit’s purpose is to work with a team of Native Americans in New Mexico to produce a new 10-minute short film to premiere each year as a highlight of the Two Worlds program. Working with professional mentors and North Fourth’s high-definition digital technology, crew members learn skills to lead to employment opportunities in New Mexico’s growing film industry and to skills that help tribal communities produce films and videos that preserve and promote their own stories, culture and industries.

For more information about Creative Spirit or to see other short films produced by the Creative Spirit participants, go to: www.nativefilm.com.

In addition to films, the Two Worlds program includes a photography exhibit and play:

Two Worlds, Many Views Photography Exhibit
Sept. 18 – Oct. 10
Gallery hours: During Two Worlds events or by appointment (505-344-4542)

Working with gels, prisms and their imaginations, sixth- and seventh-grade students at the Native American Community Academy (NACA) teamed with VSA AmeriCorps volunteers to produce images on slides, which were projected onto textured surfaces. The results, photographed by the students, make up the experimental images that are part of the “Two Worlds, Many Views” exhibit.

Indios Primeros screenwriter Roberto A. Jackson adds photographs of the harsh but beautiful landscape of the Gila Indian River Community. For Jackson, who has a bachelor of fine arts in photography from Arizona State University, these views “explore how my tribe’s relation to the land has changed in the years since the river was taken from us.”

Two young Navajo women, confined to Albuquerque’s Youth Diagnostic and Development Center, contribute beautiful and emotionally powerful photographs taken as part of the Fresh Eyes Photography Project for incarcerated youth.

Little Big Horn
8 p.m. Oct. 2-3
Tickets: $12 general; $8 students/seniors

Old West meets Middle East in Cherokee playwright Alan Kilpatrick’s edgy, rollicking farce Little Big Horn. Kilpatrick’s outrageous comedy shifts swiftly from the American frontier of 1876 to an American embassy in the Middle East of the 21st century, as it explores, with tongue firmly in cheek, American foreign policy and the ways we view cultures different than our own. Kilpatrick is a professor of American Indian studies at San Diego State University. In addition to Little Big Horn, he has written the short stage comedies The Apology and The Suppression and a nonfiction book The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery Among the Western Cherokee.

Terry Gomez, a Comanche playwright and director who lives in Santa Fe, is directing the play. Little Big Horn was selected for production following Two Worlds 2008 call for new plays by Native writers in the United States and Canada. Gomez has a bachelor of fine arts in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and a masters of fine arts in dramatic writing from the University of New Mexico. Plays she has written include Melanin, Carbon Black, Rain Dance and The Comanche Women.

TWO WORLDS 2009-2010
A Program of Native American & Indigenous Film, Theater, Dance & Photography
N4th Theater & Gallery, 4904 Fourth St. NW, Albuquerque, NM
Reservations: 344-4542
Information: www.vsartsnm.org
Theater tickets: $5

Two Worlds 2009-2010 is funded in part by Albert I. Pierce Foundation, Bernalillo County, City of Albuquerque Film Office, McCune Charitable Foundation, and New Mexico Arts, a Division of the Office of Cultural Affairs. Special thanks to Best Western Rio Grande Inn.

# # #