A very special film will be showing in Williams Lake ahead of National Indigenous Peoples Day.
“Sweet Summer Pow Wow” was co-written and directed by Darrell Dennis who grew up around the Lake City and Alkali Lake Reserve.
Dennis said the film involved a lot of his experiences growing up travelling around the Pow Wow circuit around the area.
“I wrote a script around my experiences going around as a young Indigenous man and falling in love and I put that in movie form. I really wanted to make a movie for Indigenous people that was a romantic comedy. This is really sort of a mainstream, straight ahead, romantic comedy for youth and for families.”
Dennis noted that “Sweet Summer Pow Wow” has been screening across the country already and non-Indigenous people have fallen in love with this movie.
“It shows a side of Indigenous culture, the Pow Wow Circuit that a lot of non-Indigenous people might not be familiar with. It’s story that anybody can relate to, it’s two teens falling in love, problems with their parents, and that sort of thing, it’s basically the Indigenous Romeo and Juliette and how many of us can not relate to that.”
Dennis said the exciting member of the film’s cast is the late Academy Award nominee Graham Greene.
“This is one of his last films. If you are a huge fan of Graham Greene this is another reason to come out and see the movie. He is really incredibly charming in it. I had a great relationship with him for a while and we really enjoyed working together and he loved working on this film as well.”
Dennis said he wanted to write this movie for a very long time and from the moment I sat down and really started writing with my writing partner it actually it didn’t take as long as it normally takes.
“It only took a few years from the time we started writing to the time it took to get produced and we started filming and it got to the screen which sis very shocking. There are some films that can take 10-15 years from the time it starts to time it hits theatres so we were really lucky, I’d say it 3 to 4 years from script form to theatres.”
Sweet Summer Pow Wow will be shown this Friday (September 26) through October 2nd at Paradise Cinemas in Williams Lake.
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