Clearcut

The late, great Graham Greene gives the performance of his career as Arthur, who is either a pissed-off warrior on a rampage against a mill encroaching on his people’s land, or a trickster spirit manifesting to teach an ineffectual liberal lawyer (Ron Lea) a lesson about the need for action. Clearcut was filmed in Ontario by Ryszard Bugajski, a political Polish filmmaker best known for his 1990 Palme D’Or nominee The Interrogation — which caused so much trouble for him in Poland he was forced to leave the country if he wanted to keep making films.

Made during Bugajski’s period of voluntary exile in Ontario, and adapted from MT Kelly’s Governer General’s Award-winning novel A Dream Like Mine, Clearcut features Greene’s fellow Dances With Wolves’ alum Floyd Red Crow Westerman, and boasts a wonderful turn from Battlestar Galactica’s Michael Hogan as the much-abused (and wonderfully named) mill owner Bud Rickets.

Free entry to Indigenous-identifying patrons (19+)

4K Restoration by Severin Films

Unlike the gaggle of ’walk-a-guilt-filled-mile-in-my-moccasins’ films to come out in the last few years, 1990’s Clearcut is a topical, controversial and sophisticated psychological drama about the deep frustrations haunting Indian people today… There are no beautiful, spiritually correct, nature/ poetry spewing Indians, no blubbering white person ready to braid his hair and throw off the silk shackles of the capitalist office gulags, and certainly no warm, cozy, squishy feelings of fuzzy feel-good happiness. It exposes things that are contemporary to everyone in the audience. It exposes rage, frustration, hypocrisy, confusion, deceit, truth, violence, dreams, ghosts and white smoke – everything that should leave us asking a lot of questions.

Ironbow Magazine, May 1992

A Canadian answer to Deliverance… Graham Greene is riveting.

New York Times

Completely uncompromising… Clearcut doesn’t pull any punches.

Washington Post