Emmy Award-winning documentarian Jeff Spitz appears in a special event featuring a screening of his film The Return of Navajo Boy, preceeded by a screening of the 1952 silent film that inspired it, Robert Kennedy’s Navajo Boy: The Monument Valley Story. This event will take place on Monday, May 14 at 7:30 p.m. in UCSB MultiCultural Center Theater. Spitz will be joined by guests John Wayne Cly and Corby Bennett Fleming.

Official Sundance Film Festival 2000 selection, The Return of Navajo Boy chronicles an extraordinary chain of events, beginning with the appearance of a 1950s film reel an ending with the return of a long lost brother to his Navajo family.

Living for more than six decades in Monument Valley, Utah, the Cly family has an extraordinary history in pictures. Since the 1930’s, family members have appeared as unidentified subjects in countless photographs and films shot in Monument Valley including various postcards, Hollywood Westerns and a rare home-movie by legendary director John Ford. But it is the sudden appearance of a rarely seen vintage film that affects their lives the most.

In 1997, a white man identifying himself as Bill Kennedy from Chicago showed up in Monument Valley with a silent film called Navajo Boy, which he says his late father produced in the 1950s. Seeking to understand his father’s work on the Navajo Reservation, Kennedy returns the film to the people in it. When Cly family matriarch Elsie Mae Cly Begay watches the film, she is amused to see herself as a young girl and delights in identifying other members of her family. Elsie recognizes her late mother in the old film as well as her infant brother, John Wayne Cly, who was adopted by white missionaries in the 1950s and was never heard from again.

With the return of Navajo Boy, Elsie seizes the opportunity to tell her family’s story for the first time, offering a unique perspective on the history of the American West. Using a variety of still photos and moving images from the 40s and 50s and telling their family story in their own voices, the Clys shed light on the Native side of picture-making and uranium mining in Monument Valley.

When the long lost brother, John Wayne Cly, learns about the return of Navajo Boy in a New Mexico newspaper, he contacts the Clys in hopes that they are his family. As he tells his side of the story The Return of Navajo Boy takes on a literal tone, setting in motion John Wayne’s unforgettable return to his blood brothers and sisters in an emotional reunion in Monument Valley.

This unique Sundance Film Festival 2000 selection weaves together all the different threads of the Cly family story, narrated by Elsie’s son Lorenzo Begay. Through this inside narrative of the Cly’s inspirational saga, The Return of Navajo Boy gives new meaning to old pictures and performs a healing miracle of its own.

Spitz’s work, which focuses on real people whose stories challenge our assumptions and revive our sense of human potential, has aired on ABC, PBS, A&E and The Learning Channel. Spitz has served in the hybrid capacity of writer-director-producer for several acclaimed documentaries, including the national primetime PBS film, From the Bottom Up, as well as the education exposes Many Voices, Many Dreams, Tell No Lies and Mis Padres, Mis Maestros. He also handled writing, directing and production duties for the documentary, America’s Libraries Change Lives, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg.

Spitz wrote and produced The Roosevelt Experiment, an Emmy Award-winning ABC-TV Special. He also wrote and produced The Unexplained: ESP, Dreams and Disasters for A&E and The 90s: Race and Racism for national PBS.

Spitz is a graduate of UCLA and holds a Master of Arts degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. A native Californian, he currently resides in Chicago with his wife, Jennifer.

This event is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures as part of American Indian Culture Week; it is sponsored by the UCSB MultiCultural Center and American Indian Cultural Services.

For more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
Roman Baratiak at (805) 893-2080.