Date of birth: December 4, 1968 Place of birth: Indian reservation of Warm Springs, Oregon, USA. Chris Ayre is the first Native American filmmaker to achieve Hollywood success and international acclaim. Smoke Signals (1998) was the winner of the Sundance Independent Film Festival and launched his career; currently he has directed 6 feature films, including two adaptations of Tony Hillerman’s popular “police” novels, documentary works, the most significant of which is the series “We Will Stay”, dedicated
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Date of birth: December 4, 1968 Place of birth: Indian reservation of Warm Springs, Oregon, USA. Chris Ayre is the first Native American filmmaker to achieve Hollywood success and international acclaim. Smoke Signals (1998) was the winner of the Sundance Independent Film Festival and launched his career; currently he has directed 6 feature films, including two adaptations of Tony Hillerman’s popular “police” novels, documentary works, the most significant of which is the series “We Will Stay”, dedicated to rethinking the contribution of Native Americans to US history, as well as a number of projects on television. Raised in a middle-class white family, at the age of 18, Ayr was officially reunited with the tribe from which he came, and 7 years later he managed to find his real family. His work, like his life, is an attempt to connect two worlds in a tragic confrontation: Native American and non-Indian America. The filmmaker is ruthless to the mass stereotypes of Indians that the world owes to Hollywood and that most people find so hard to part with; humor and irony are his main weapons in the fight against cultural segregation in the 21st century. To make films not about “oppressed minorities” and social problems, but primarily about people – that’s probably how Chris Ayre’s creative credo is defined. The director himself admitted that he would be happy to work on material that is far from the main themes of his films, but he still, as in his youth, is haunted by a sense of disharmony in the relations between people and cultures, and as long as he has the opportunity, he will try to bridge the gap between them.