RED FEVER: 3 STARS. “paints a vivid portrait of Indigenous resilience.”
LOGLINE: In the documentary “Red Fever,” now playing in select theatres, Cree co-director Neil Diamond examines popular culture’s fascination with stereotypical imagery of Indigenous people, cultural appropriation and how Indigenous society shaped the modern world. “There is a deeper story about why the world is fascinated with us,” Neil Diamond says, “and how profoundly we’ve influenced them.”
CAST: Neil Diamond. Co-directed by Catherine Bainbridge.
REVIEW: Broken into segments, “Red Fever” breaks down its story into four chapters, Fashion (Spirit), Sports (Body), Politics (Mind) and Earth (Heart). Within each sequence genial host Neil Diamond acts as a tour guide, travelling across North America and Europe to shine a light on each topic.
A mix of entertainment and education, the jauntily paced doc breaks down colonialism in the fashion world with an eye-opening montage of high-fashion headdresses on New York and Paris runways, and follows the story through to the work of today’s Indigenous creators and designers. It’s the most detailed of the sections, calling out cultural appropriation for what it really is, damaging cultural theft.
The story of legendary Sac and Fox Nation athlete and Olympian Jim Thorpe is the centerpiece of the Sports section, while the Politics sequence is moistly academic talking heads explaining the Iroquois Confederacy’s impact on the US Constitution. The movie wraps with Earth, and an examination of Vancouver Island First Nations’ salmon farming protests.
It covers a lot of ground, and in its totality “Red Fever” is a bit uneven in its execution, but it is educational and entertaining, and paints a vivid portrait of Indigenous resilience.
