Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterAmerican Spirits
Jan 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Kristinha M. Anding
Filmmaker Angelique Midthunder dedicates her work to the country’s wild horses and native peoples.
Self-taught documentarian Angelique Midthunder shoots footage of Stanford Addison, a quadriplegic horse tamer, for the documentary Silent Thunder. PBS showcased the film last November.
Angelique Midthunder knows she's fortunate. The Sante Fe, N.M.-based documentarian has been able to concentrate her career on her passions: representing America's wild horses and native peoples.
The horse focus came easy; Midthunder has been a self-proclaimed horse lover her entire life. She began paying attention to indigenous issues after marrying her husband, Native American actor David Midthunder, 10 years ago. “Having kids, I want them to be able to have a strong sense of culture and pride in who they are,” she says.
Her latest film, a 30-minute documentary called Silent Thunder, combines both interests. The piece, funded by Native American Public Telecommunications and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, follows Stanford Addison, a horse tamer living on Wyoming's Arapaho/Shoshoni Wind River Reservation. When Addison was 20, a truck he was riding in hit a herd of horses, severing his spine and rendering him quadriplegic. After the accident, the reflective Addison found his calling: to tame wild horses using a gentle, intuitive technique. Now he serves not only as a spiritual advisor for his community, but also as a professional horse trainer with world renown.
“At first, it was more about the process of training the horses,” Midthunder says of the piece. “I thought, ‘How in the world does this guy in a wheelchair tame wild horses in a week?’ But when I got there, started filming, and got to know him, I realized it was a way bigger story about courage and pride and every person's individual journey.”
Midthunder, DP Tristan Barnard, and co-producers Steven Judd and Tvli Jacob shot Silent Thunder using one Sony HDR-FX1 HDV camera and two Panasonic AG-DVX100A cameras (the camera that Midthunder also used on her film, Reservation War Parties, which aired on PBS' Independent Lens). For the first time, she served as her own editor, cutting the piece on her Avid Xpress Pro system, which she learned how to use by watching a professional editor cut her first mainstream success, America's First Horse, picked up by both Animal Planet and the Hildago DVD.
Midthunder's films have connected Native American independent filmmakers, such as Judd and Jacob, with established Hollywood personalities, such as her executive producer, Hildago writer John Fusco. “There are definitely common grounds and interests,” Midthunder says. “It's worked for us.”
For more information about Midthunder's work, please visit www.midthunder.com.
