Indigenous Representation On Cinema

Well, it's something I've been thinking about since I first saw Avatar: The Way of Water (I'm on my second now, I think I'm ready to write)
First some statistics:
The 2021 Hollywood Diversity Report showed Native representation in film stagnant at 0.6%. These reports also found that creative roles, like writers or directors, showed virtually no Native representation.
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The representation of indigenous peoples in cinema is a complex and complex subject, beginning with Tabu by F.W. Murnau and from the classic Hollywood westerns and reaching the pop versions of Disney Pocahontas and of course the two mega-blockbusters Avatar.
For the most part, this tradition is characterized by two apparently opposing but actually complementary modes: the native as barbaric enemy and the native as noble savage. Both versions are problematic in their own way, as the first tends towards dehumanization and the second towards exoticization. Avatar, let's say, like most Hollywood films for about half a century, falls into the latter category.
Of course, there is also cinema that represents the indigenous people in their multiplicity and specificity, without giving in to the temptation of easy stereotypical depictions or simplistic/simplistic moral and ideological charges. And in its best moments, when it comes specifically from the very populations it represents, it also breaks the categorization of the indigenous exclusively in the realm of the cinematic Other.
The last Thessaloniki Festival held in November, a month before the release of Avatar 2 quite coincidentally, hosted a very interesting tribute to indigenous cinema. At the same time, we see pop culture attempting more to play with more "authentic" representations, such as in the series Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls, or in the recent Prey, the prequel to Predator that takes place in the 18th century against the backdrop of tensions between Native Americans and European settlers.
On the occasion of all this, I made a list of 10 films that fall under what we would call indigenous cinema, divided into two groups of 5: one with films that played at the Thessaloniki Festival tribute last year and which come from indigenous creators, and one with films which (even if they contain stereotypes) suggested interesting ways to think about and represent these issues on the big screen. These, I think, are worth looking into, and if you have any additional suggestions, let me know in the comments.
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)

The Exiles is a film by Kent MacKenzie chronicling a day in the life of a group of 20-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the district of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California.
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BeDevil (Tracey Moffatt, 1993)

The film is a trilogy of surreal ghost stories. Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal and Irish Australian families, Moffatt created a trilogy in which characters are haunted by the past. All three stories are set in Moffatt's highly stylised, hyper-real, hyper-imaginary Australian landscape.
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Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001)

Set in the ancient past, the film retells an Inuit legend passed down through centuries of oral tradition. It revolves around the title character, whose marriage with his two wives earns him the animosity of the son of the band leader, who kills Atanarjuat's brother and forces Atanarjuat to flee by foot.
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Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009)

The film depicts two Indigenous Australian 14-year-olds living in a remote Aboriginal community who steal a car and escape their difficult lives by going to Alice Springs.
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Tanna (Martin Butler & Bentley Dean, 2015)

Tanna is a 2015 Australian-Ni-Vanuatu[4] film set on the island of Tanna in the South Pacific, depicting the true story of a couple who decided to marry for love, rather than obey their parents' wishes.
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The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, 1960)

An Inuk hunter kills a Christian missionary who rejects his traditional offer of food and his wife's company. Pursued by white policemen, the Inuk saves the life of one of them, resulting in a final confrontation in which the surviving cop must decide between his commitment to law enforcement and his gratitude to the Inuk.
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Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)

it centres on two white schoolchildren who are left to fend for themselves in the Australian outback and who come across a teenage Aboriginal boy who helps them to survive.
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Where the Green Ants Dream (Werner Herzog, 1984)

Based on a true story about Indigenous land rights in Australia but slated as a mixture of fact and fiction,
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The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

depicting the founding of the Jamestown, Virginia, settlement and inspired by the historical figures Captain John Smith, Pocahontas of the Powhatan tribe, and Englishman John Rolfe. It is the fourth feature film written and directed by Malick.
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Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015)

the film follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle, one with Theo, a German ethnographer, and the other with Evan, an American botanist, both of whom are searching for the rare plant yakruna. It was inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, and dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures.
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