Film Screening: Rising Voices

Date: Thursday, January 16, 2020

Time: 6:30 p.m. (Doors open at 6:00 p.m.)

Location: Performance Theater, Birthplace of Country Music Museum

FREE EVENT, but please RSVP!

RSVP HERE

Join us for a free screening of the award-winning documentary film Rising Voices/Hóthaninpi: Revitalizing the Lakota Language at the museum! The screening is complementary programming to the current special exhibit American Ballads: The Photographs of Marty Stuart  on display in the special exhibits gallery at the museum through January 31, 2020. American Ballads includes a section of stunning photographs of the Lakota people.

Five years in the making, this multi-platform project tells the story of a powerful threat to a Native culture – one that comes through TV sets and social media sites, through tweets and comic strips and the daily news. The menace is the English language, and the victim seemingly marked for extinction is the Lakota language itself.

For the Lakota people, it’s a local problem, but it’s just one instance of a massive global one – a worldwide epidemic of language extinction. The project includes a one-hour documentary film. The film is serious but unconventional, at times describing life on the reservation from the Lakota perspective. Woven through the documentary are sections of four short films by Lakota filmmakers made especially for inclusion in Rising Voices/Hótȟaŋiŋpi.

The film is a portrait of a culture, an unflinching look at the language loss and a probing analysis of the revitalization efforts that have brought hope to the Native speakers on the Lakota reservations of North and South Dakota.

The film is a collaboration between Florentine Films/Hott Productions and The Language Conservancy.