Joy Harjo’s “Reality Show”

Mekko Productions, Inc. announces the completion of a short video, Reality Show A Video Diary of Joy Harjo.

Funded by Native American Public Telecommunications, a native media organization that, among other things, funds the production of programming by and about Native Americans for national PBS, this short film is a video diary of Joy Harjo, cut to the beat of her music. It provides a glimpse of the many activities that make up the life of this well-known Mvskoke/Creek poet and musician and her thoughts behind it all. Greeting the morning from her home in Honolulu, this slice of her life finds her north of the Arctic Circle at the annual Indigenous Riddu Riddu Festival, in Norway, teaching at UCLA, rehearsing and performing with her Mvskoke musician friends, paddling her canoe in Hawai’I and in Albuquerque with her family. Threaded throughout is Joy’s music and sax and the Navajo refrain “Nizhoniigo”, which acknowledges the beauty that surrounds it all.

Directed and produced by Native Hawaiian filmmaker Lurline Wailana McGregor in collaboration with Joy Harjo, this their second video production together. 
The first was a music video, Eagle Song, which was nominated for an award at the prestigious Native American Indian Film and Video Festival in San Francisco in 2002 and has been screened in many film festivals nationally and internationally. Lurline McGregor has produced many award winning videos, primarily about her own Native Hawaiian community. Joy Harjo, best known for her poetry and music, co-wrote the script for the signature film, A Thousand Roads, which opened in Spring, 2005 at the National Museum to the American Indian on the Washington, D.C. mall.