SALAMANCA — A Seneca filmmaker spent Tuesday evening at the Ray Evans Seneca Theater showing and discussing several of his short films that deal with Native American culture.
Terry Jones, a native of the Cattaraugus Territory near Silver Creek, is an award-winning filmmaker whose movies have been screened all over the world. He is currently raising funds to help offset costs to travel to India to work on new projects.
The night included a presentation of six of Jones’s films, each of which he introduced before their showings, followed by a meal of corn soup and a question and answer session.
“For me, it’s like I’ll be engaging the five senses,” he said. “First, I’ll engage in sight and sound, and in the end you’ll get smell, taste and touch from the soup.”
In May 2016, Jones graduated summa cum laude from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in film. He then began sending his movies to film festivals around the world. He said eight films have been shown and acclaimed at many of them.
“I have this archive of films I can show to the community, because tonight is not just for Native Americans,” he said. “I want to bring in the people who might not know about our culture and watching the films will give them a little peek into who we are.”
The featured film of the evening was “Thomas Indian School Reunion,” which Jones filmed in 2004. From 1855 to 1957, the Thomas Indian School operated on the Seneca Territory. Each year, former students gather and share their experience about the boarding school, sharing their unique perspective of life as they fought to retain their native identity.
“I screened it at the Seneca Theater about 10 years ago, and there were former students at that screening,” Jones said. “The film at that time was about 14 minutes long, but the feedback that I got was they wished it was longer.”
At that time it was one of the first documentaries Jones had made by himself. He said he didn’t really know what he was doing and had a lot of footage left over.
“When I decided to put this program together, I decided to go back in and extend it, so tonight is like the official premiere of the extended re-edited version, which is about 30 minutes long,” he said.
A project Jones did with his filmmaking partner from college, Govind Deecee, shows what happens when two Indian filmmakers — one from India and the other an American Indian — visits each other’s homelands. “Gathered Places” explores the similarities and differences between these ancient cultures through the “Indian” lenses of the filmmakers.
“It shows me going to India and him coming to our territories,” Jones explained.
Other films shown included “Unearthed,” “Gripped,” “Empire State” and “Soup for My Brother,” all of which show stories of Native Americans and certain hardships they can face, something Jones said all people can understand.
“Sometimes we can be a little bit closed in terms of what happens here and our way of life,” Jones said. “There’s elements that are interesting to us without being a discussion panel or talking heads. We can do it in a narrative form or documentary form.”
Jones said he hoped the night showed how the community can come together and see how native and non-native lives can be similar even through big differences.
“There’s universal themes and universal situations that anyone can identify with. It just so happens that my characters are Native Americans,” he said.
(Contact reporter Kellen Quigley at kquigleysp@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter, @Kellen_Quigley)
