Chris Billing » Notice

Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival

import — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 22:00:20 +0000

Lost Sparrow has been nominated for the Best Documentary award at the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival, November 24-28, 2010.

NPR’s Tell Me More

import — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:00:20 +0000

Lost Sparrow director Chris Billing was Michel Martin’s guest on the NPR program Tell Me More.

World Magazine

import — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:00:20 +0000

The opening moments of the new documentary Lost Sparrow shows grainy footage of three-decade-old images of a large, multi-ethnic family. The seemingly happy clan poses for a group photo. But the clip ends suddenly, with the flickering white screen fading to black.
The darkness is replaced by video from the present. It is a recent cloudy day at, of all places, a cemetery in Manheim, N.Y. There, the camera pans past American flags flapping in the wind before it zooms in on a bulldozer tearing into a gravesite’s soil. Two coffins are excavated, boxed up, and loaded onto the back of a U-Haul truck.

Click here to read more.

Indian Country Today article

import — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 21:00:20 +0000

When two young Crow Indian brothers ran away from their white adoptive family’s home and were killed by a freight train more than three decades ago, their deaths devastated the family and shocked the small community in upstate New York where they lived.

Filmmaker Chris Billing was 16 years old when his adopted Crow brothers Bobby, 13, and Tyler, 11, were killed on June 27, 1978. Their deaths haunted him for years.

When Billing set out 30 years later to make a film about his lost brothers, his goal was to investigate the unanswered questions about their sudden and mysterious deaths – why did the seemingly happy well-adjusted boys run away from home that day? Where were they going? Why were they on the train tracks?

Read the rest of the article at Indian Country Today.