The 23rd Bend Film Festival wrapped up Sunday, Oct. 11, after five days of screenings in Bend, Oregon. The festival announced this year’s winners Saturday, Oct. 10, at a dinner at Greg’s Grill, and its two Indigenous winners were films about land and water on opposite sides of the world.
BendFilm runs its own Indigenous competition alongside its narrative, documentary, and environmental categories. The festival takes place on the ancestral homeland of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Academy recognizes it as an Oscar qualifier for Indigenous short films.
The winners
Kikuyu Land, directed by Bea Wangondu and Andrew H. Brown, won Best Indigenous Feature. The documentary looks at Kenya’s contested tea fields and the colonial exploitation that still shapes life there. The jury was Warm Springs filmmaker LaRonn Katchia, Dawn Jones Redstone, and Johnnie Jae. In their statement, they wrote that colonialism has left its mark on communities well beyond Kenya.
Best Indigenous Short went to First Descent: Kayaking the Klamath by Jessie Sears. The film follows young Indigenous paddlers learning the Klamath River after its dams came out, and the jury praised how it connects decades of work to free the river with a new generation getting to know it. Festival audiences liked it too. It also took the Audience Award. Since Bend is an Oscar qualifier for Indigenous shorts, the jury win puts First Descent in line for Academy consideration.
Tantoo Cardinal honored
Actress Tantoo Cardinal was named this year’s Indigenous Honoree.
Cardinal, who is Cree and Métis, was born Rose Marie Cardinal in Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 1950. She grew up in the nearby hamlet of Anzac, raised largely by her grandmother.
Her first professional role was in a 1971 CBC docudrama. Her lead in Anne Wheeler’s Loyalties (1986) earned a Genie nomination, and in 1990 she reached a worldwide audience as Black Shawl in Dances With Wolves. Since then she has appeared in Black Robe, Legends of the Fall, Smoke Signals, Wind River and Killers of the Flower Moon, along with TV series like North of 60, which won her a Gemini Award, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and Longmire. She got her first top billing in Falls Around Her, directed by Anishinaabe filmmaker Darlene Naponse. All told she has more than 120 film, TV and stage roles.
On stage, Cardinal helped found the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company and played Regan in the National Arts Centre’s all-Indigenous King Lear in 2012. She has also spoken out against Alberta’s oil sands and was arrested outside the White House in 2011 while protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. She was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 2009, received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement in 2020 and joined Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2023.
Past BendFilm Indigenous Honorees include Jessica Matten in 2025 and Sydney Freeland in 2024.
The rest of the Indigenous lineup
Kikuyu Land competed against two other features. Aanikoobijigan (Ancestor), by Adam and Zack Khalil, follows repatriation specialists in Michigan who work to bring ancestral remains out of museum collections and back home. It won the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance in January. The River Remembers, directed by Jordan Riber, follows tribal members on the Elwha and Klamath rivers as they led the two largest dam removals in U.S. history.
Four films made up the shorts competition. Along with First Descent, the jury watched Pretty Frickin’ Deadly, Shadow in the Desert, and Shaped by Land. That last one, directed by Emily Sullivan, follows Adam Kjeldsen, a Greenlandic ski guide who wants tourism money to help his community without wrecking the land it depends on.
The Klamath appeared twice in this year’s Indigenous program: First Descent and The River Remembers. The 2027 festival is set for Oct. 6 to 10.
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