Tamara Podemski: Press

ROLLING STONE "Sundance Shockers" - Peter Travers

" Oscar Maybes...And don't worry if you've never heard of Tamara Podemski - see her in FOUR SHEETS TO THE WIND as a Native American who has moved way off the reservation, and you'll remember her name and how to spell it. She's the knockout discovery of Sundance '07."

CINEMATICAL "Hollywood's a Bad, Bad Boyfriend" - Kim Voynar

"If we want to support more women filmmakers making good narrative films…more actresses taking on challenging, non-traditional roles (see: Kate Winslet in Little Children, Ellen Page in Hard Candy, Jess Weixler in Teeth, Nicole Kidman in Fur, Tamara Podemski in Four Sheets to the Wind -- I want to see a LOT more of her -- or Toni Collette in pretty much anything), then we need to get off our collective duffs and stop accepting less."

FILM THREAT "Reviews" - Zack Haddad

"Podemski's Miri is especially fun to watch, mostly due to all her foolish choices, providing classic comic relief."

SCREEN INTERNATIONAL - Patrick Z. McGavin

"Well played by Podemski, the part of Miri takes on a darker filigree, and she adopts quickly and decisively the character's abrupt, constantly shifting emotional movements."

CINEMATICAL "Reviews" - Kim Voynar

"Podemski gives a powerfully wrenching performance as Miri, telegraphing the young woman's inner turmoil with every look and movement.

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER "Review" - Duane Byrge

"The performances are richly subdued. Podemski's performance as [Cufe's] hard-drinking sister shows the young woman's fears and loneliness."

Backstage West - Sarah Kuhn and Gregg Goldstein

Recognized as "talent that broke through this year" for her role in "Four Sheets to the Wind."

TORONTO (Canadian Press)
Tamara Podemski's phone has not stopped ringing with calls from Hollywood studios and casting agents since she unexpectedly walked away with a prestigious acting prize at last month's Sundance Film Festival.

"It came out of nowhere, so it was a total shock, and I am still sort of riding this roller-coaster," Podemski, 29, says in an interview from her Toronto home.

Podemski plays a troubled native American in the indie film "Four Sheets to the Wind," about an aboriginal family in small-town Oklahoma. The Sundance jury honoured Podemski for her "fully realized physical and emotional turn" as Miri, a woman whose carefree lifestyle brings her to the brink of tragedy.

Even though the film has yet to find a distributor, Podemski's performance has caught the attention of Hollywood power brokers, and the lifelong Torontonian - who's also an accomplished musician and dancer - is heeding their calls to move to Tinseltown.

"NBC Universal were the most adamant of the people I've talked to, to just get me down there and get me in some meetings as soon as possible. So I'm going in a couple of weeks, but moving to L.A. is most definitely happening as well."

She isn't making the move without some sadness.

"I invested so many years in this industry up here, and I believe so much in this industry - my first film was the Bruce McDonald movie 'Dance Me Outside' - so there are loyalty issues," says Podemski, who was named best female artist and best songwriter at last fall's Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards.

The actress has appeared in several Canadian TV series, including "The Rez" and "Ready or Not," and oddly enough, became something of a star in Germany for her role in the German-Canadian co-production "Blue Hawk/Blauvogel."

But she adds that it's time to face facts - she owes her greatest career successes to Americans. It was U.S. director Sterlin Harjo, after all, who chose her for the lead role of Miri, and while she had a supporting role in the Toronto version of the stage musical "Rent" in the late 1990s, American producers chose her for the lead role of Maureen on Broadway.

"I have three careers - acting, music and dance - so when one was slow, I ended up doing something else. And I think that might have been deceiving to me until I stepped back and realized: 'Wow, you really haven't been on the screen in a while,' " she says.

"It was only when I did this film last summer, and had a lead role that was the meatiest and most in-depth that I've ever been given, that's when I stopped and thought: 'Whoa, I'm actually capable of this. Why hasn't anybody back home given me a role like this?' So the wheels started turning last year, and I just started looking at my whole career and seeing that my greatest roles, and the biggest successes in my career, have happened because of Americans noticing me."

She's not miffed about that, Podemski is quick to point out.

"I am so grateful for the projects and the people that I've worked with here, but I've never been given a lead role. Even my first album was on a record label out of Los Angeles that brought me down there, and up here I had to make my own label to put out my own album," she says with a laugh.

"I am not bitter, I am not angry, but it's just an observation that I've had to make and now I have to act accordingly."

When she moves to L.A., Podemski worries about missing her family - "a huge part of my life," she says - and not having the chance to continue her Canadian work with disadvantaged native teens in remote aboriginal communities, something she credits with "keeping her sane" in the topsy-turvy world of show business.

But she admits that, professionally speaking, she had become a bit complacent.

"I got comfortable doing the series that came along once in a while and the odd play here and there, but I now need to broaden my horizons and focus on what my biggest dream is," she says.

"And having a taste of what it is to sink my teeth into a character and getting my rocks off as an actor .... I don't know if I can risk never tasting that again."

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

TULSA, Okla.

IT would be tough organizing a respectable traffic jam in this part of town, especially in the dead heat of a summer afternoon. So the motley collection of cars, vans and movie equipment — and the tiny trailer advertising “Indian Tacos” — that have been assembled for a film shoot draw the kind of attention they never could in Hollywood or New York.

But this isn’t Hollywood or New York. The sound department, so to speak, is set up in the shade of a corrugated iron awning, outside a bar that looks as if it were decorated by a tsunami carrying a load of uncapped Sharpies. The producers, Chad Burris and Ted Kroeber, are lugging folding chairs around. But then everyone is doing something that isn’t in his or her job description. Shooting comes to a halt for the passing of the occasional tractor-trailer because the production can’t close the streets. (“Not without paying cops $300 a day to do it,” Mr. Burris said.) A few days earlier, an apparently inebriated man fell off his porch across the road from the set, crying: “Kill my life! Kill my face!” The crew wanted to work it into the script.

“Four Sheets to the Wind,” the debut feature by the writer and director Sterlin Harjo, is a coming-of-age story, set in Tulsa and nearby Holdenville. Almost the entire cast and many of the crew members are American Indians. “Among ourselves,” said Mr. Burris, an Oklahoma native and Chickasaw, “it’s more like ‘Induns.’ ” Not coincidentally, interpretations and definitions become knotty factors in an Indian movie, something rare enough that unfair expectations and obligations naturally attach themselves to it.

“With ‘Dances With Wolves,’ Indians were hot,” said Tamara Podemski, an actress, referring to the Oscar-winning Kevin Costner movie of 1990. “But as great as that was, it was about how we used to be. What needs to be done is show how we are now.”

That is Mr. Harjo’s intention, but it’s no easy task. Ms. Podemski, who plays Miri, the troubled sister of the film’s lead character, Cufe (Cody Lightning of “Smoke Signals”), points to the problem besetting any movie defined by its ethnicity. “There’s a lot of fear among people in the community about showing contemporary images, especially if they’re negative,” she said. “Because even if there’s truth in there, the fear is that audiences don’t have enough knowledge about the reality, so they’ll accept the negative aspect as the whole story.”

The script, which went through the screening lab of the Sundance Institute (where Mr. Harjo, Mr. Kroeber and Mr. Burris have all been fellows), is not negative. Nor is it self-consciously Indian. “People will say what they want to say,” Mr. Harjo said. “But more than anything, it’s about human beings who happen to be Native Americans.”

But not all Indians are the same. And they don’t all see eye to eye on the translation of their culture, however contemporary its context. Mr. Harjo bookends the story with a narration delivered in Muscogee, to be accompanied by English subtitles. (Mr. Harjo himself is Seminole, Creek, “Italian and a little German.”) When Norma Jean Marshall, the manager for the Muscogee language program of the Muscogee-Creek Nation, was enlisted to translate, she took exception to one of Mr. Harjo’s lines, which referred to “sorting out the details” of the ensuing narrative.

“The best way I can explain it is that when Jesus told a parable, it would mean something to one person, and something different to another,” Ms. Marshall said. “When an Indian tells a story, it becomes the truth. You don’t have to sort out the details. You know what it means once you’ve heard it, based on personal experience. So ‘sorting out the details’ isn’t something we would say.”

Similar debates surround the very creation of so-called Indian cinema. Indian culture is based on an oral tradition, which is contrary to the kind of definitive imagery rendered on film. The issue, then, becomes whether cinema is contrary to Indian culture.

“The Conchetti Pueblo, just for instance, were resistant to preserving their culture on tape,” said Beverly Morris, a program director for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M. “But with the advent of new technology and their familiarity with it, they’ve started to do that, with their own people.”

Some contemporary Indians, Ms. Morris noted, have voiced suspicion of even the most well-meaning chroniclers of their culture. “Let’s face it, there’s been a lot of resentment about past exploitation,” she said, citing not just Hollywood but also anthropologists, National Geographic-style preservationists and even the Indian photographer Edward Curtis.

“I don’t want to say the visual medium is replacing the oral tradition,” said Mr. Burris, who specialized in Indian law before becoming a producer, “but I think it’s encompassing it. And I think that’s out of necessity in terms of the world we live in now. Stories can still be told and passed on and lessons be taught. But we’re such a visual society. The media are such an influence and can be such a great way of conveying a message. I think, just out of necessity, the traditional stories are going to fall into the visual medium.”

The campaign to make Indian filmmaking a mainstream commodity has had its false starts. In 1998 “Smoke Signals,” directed by Chris Eyre and written by novelist Sherman Alexie, made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival, which had for years showcased Indian movies in its Native section. Mr. Eyre and Mr. Alexie have subsequently written or directed other films, but their success has been modest, and Sundance has discontinued the Native section.

“That was an effort to highlight and put native cinema on the map,” said Bird Runningwater, who directs the Native Initiatives programs at the Sundance Institute. “We felt we did that. The next logical step was to program them festival-wide, in the general program, so that’s the move we’ve made the last couple of festivals. I think it’s helped the films reach a wider audience.”

“Four Sheets to the Wind” is a unifying movie — the pride the participants share in the project is something they mention frequently — and one that shows the diversity of the native peoples. Along with Mr. Harjo and Mr. Burris, Mr. Lightning is Plains-Cree, his co-star Jeri Arredondo is Apache, and Ms. Podemski is Ojibway and Jewish. (“We burned smudge,” she said, “at the Passover Seder.”) What they have in common with all independent filmmakers are the very things they lack: money and celebrity, in a system that favors the status quo.

“I got a lot of, ‘Love your script, it’s going to be great, but we have to pass,’ ” said Mr. Harjo, who is 26. “It’s hard for any independent filmmaker, but when you have Native American leads, it’s even harder ’cause there’s no one to put on the poster. No famous white person, anyway.” But “everyone who’s here and working so hard is here because they love the story,” he said. And they love the feeling of accomplishment.

Mr. Burris said: “At some point during the production it sinks in and there’s an overwhelming sense of pride. You see a cut, where it’s all taking shape. Man, that’s good. You lose sight of that sometimes. But it’s like seeing your kid walk for the first time.”

Local musician and Broadway star Tamara Podemski should prepare an acceptance speech for next year’s Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards. Her new album, a collection of 12 original songs tentatively called "From the Drum," takes music to another level with a successful blend of hand drums, guitars, piano, and other instruments. As food as the music, however, it is Podemski's deep and soothing voice - singing primarily in Ojibway - that draws the listener into a place of beauty.

"All of the tracks began as hand drum songs that I wrote," Podemski says. "We then built on top of that with other instruments. This is why I want to call it "From the Drum" as all the songs were born from the hand drum." The talented Podemski wrote all lyrics, and melodies for the album; her collaborator, Ron Allen, a local musician, co-wrote, co-arranged and co-produced with Podemski who recorded the album in four days.

The album begins with one of the many standout tracks, Meegwetch, an upbeat song of thanks where Podemski's voice flows like a gentle river. Each song follows the other like the seasons: the album's calibre is so strong that every song fits into the other seamlessly. Roundlake 49er a bittersweet song that best demonstrates how Podemski blends Ojibway with English, and the drum with the guitar. On Wasaya, Podemski's voice is mixed on top of itself creating a layer of depth that shows the beauty of the Ojibway language.

In a field that is so diverse and talented, "From the Drum" [Spirit Voices] is one of the strongest new albums by a Native artist.

Spirit Nation sounds complicated. After all, the lead singer is half Native American and half Israeli, and sings in Ojibway, English, and Hebrew; that in and of itself makes this a rather ambitious project with definite UN-peacekeeping-force overtones. With something this eclectic, one is always apprehensive as to whether the goulash of cultural references will work. On Winter Moons, it does work, and works astonishingly well.

Make no mistake; Spirit Nation is very much lead singer Tamara Podemski’s project. While the backing musicianship is competent to talented, providing an interesting synthesis of traditional, trance, pop, and dance as background, the feature is Podemski’s arching, intricate, razor-precise vocals. While superficially similar to New Age etheric warblers like Enya, Podemski has more grit and fire to her voice. The liner notes indicate that this was envisioned as a tribute to her twin heritages, and the passion and fire in her singing shows that she truly did mean to honor all those who have gone before her, and better than that, succeeded in that honoring.

Production wise, Winter Moons is flawless. (Ah, why I like the 21st century -- the fact that there are fewer CDs that sound bad on the recording end). The musicianship is good, albeit rarely noteworthy, save the delicate flutework of Steve Tavaglione. Even when Podemski doesn’t sing, such as on “Spirit Medicine”, the CD doesn’t lose steam.

Tracks worth of note include the opening “Ododaymiwan”, the mixed Ojibway , Hebrew, and English of “All My Relations”, the strong triumphant “Iroquoian Sky Woman”, and the gentle “Tipikan (Lullaby)”. There isn’t a bad track on Winter Moons, however; it’s solid from beginning to end.

For lovers of world music, this is one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time, and worth the effort to search it out. Grab Winter Moons today.

RATING: A