Long Line of Ladies (Short)
**Seen for the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
I’m not sure if I would say documentaries are my favorite genre of film, but they’re definitely up there. I think it’s because, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more interested in learning about other cultures and lives than my own. The struggle through the real world has become something more capable of inspiring my empathy than narrative cinema, and to a certain extent, it’s helped me be more empathetic towards certain narrative works over the years.
In “Long Line of Ladies,” we get a glimpse of a young woman getting ready to participate in a ceremony long dormant among her tribe. Ihuk was a coming-of-age ritual for the girls of the Karuk tribe in Northern California when they would have their first period. During the Gold Rush, the ritual was halted after sexual violence and attacks ran rampant towards the Karuk women and girls at the hands of the settlers. For 120 years, the tribe did not see fit to continue the practice. Now, they have, and we watch as one of the first girls gets ready for it.
Directors Shaandiin Tome & Rayka Zehtabchi do not focus on what happened in the past, but what is happening now; title cards give us enough of the history of why Ihuk was not practiced for over a century. For them, the importance of this subject is seeing what it means not just for the younger generation who will be the first to reintroduce this tradition to their people, but the older women who never had the opportunity to go through this themselves. The words of the women, and in poems recited by the elders, give weight to this moment. Words are sparse, though- at least, it felt that way to me- in this 22-minute documentary; the images are what we’ll take away from this film, and they are unforgettable.
