“I ka wā mamua, I ka wā mahope.”
Through the Past is the Future.
Hawaiian proverb
The Smithsonian Institution is hosting the online Mother Tongue Film Festival to celebrate cultural and linguistic diversity. The festival will showcase films and filmmakers from around the world, highlighting the critical role languages play in our daily lives and the importance of maintaining languages that are vanishing. For American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians, this is an urgent reality, because their mother languages are the only means to communicate with elders, the wisdom keepers, to learn about and from their collective pasts. These languages express ideas and values on which their cultures are built, and Native mother tongues capture concepts that don’t exist in English.
The festival events and film premieres span from February 17 – March 4, 2022. Check out the event schedule and learn more about the films on offer here.
