Colliding Worlds: Restoring Orie Medicinebull’s 1980 UCLA Student Film

On April 9th, AMIA-UCLA is honored to invite filmmaker, North Fork Mono Rancheria tribal citizen, and UCLA alum Orie Medicinebull for a Zoom conversation on the restoration of her UCLA student film, Colliding Worlds (1980). The event will take place April 9th at 11am on Zoom (link below). Orie was part of the L.A. Rebellion film movement at UCLA. In addition to her filmmaking, she is an educator and community organizer. Her student film Colliding Worlds (1980) emerged from the L.A. Rebellion and this conversation will center around its making, loss, rediscovery, and restoration. Also joining the conversation will be Krista Riggs, the director of Madera County Library, and Willow Germs, the conservation archivist at the California State Archives, a filmmaker, and a California Revealed Advisory Board Member.

Colliding Worlds: Restoring Orie Medicinebull’s 1980 UCLA Student Film

Apr 9, 2026 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Meeting ID: 998 4245 3844

Zoom Link

For some information about the project history see below.

In 2020, Madera County Library participated in the Digitization and Preservation Assistance program at California Revealed, submitting films that had been stored in a wooden shed in a fire-prone area. While performing quality control on the digitized files, Willow Germs was struck by one film in particular: a short, independent documentary that centers on four generations of women’s relationships to their traditions and popular culture, including acorn gathering, powwows, rock ‘n’ roll music, and hand games. This faded 16mm print was Colliding Worlds (1980), a film made by Orie Medicinebull, an educator, community organizer, filmmaker, and tribal citizen of the North Fork Mono Rancheria.

The film documents the “People Who Live Where the Cedar Trees Start to Grow” (Wah-up-weh-tuhneum), also known as the Mono or Western Monache people, and their attempts to maintain cultural traditions such as acorn collecting, food preparation, music, dance, powwows, and games. Filmmaker Orie Medicinebull was the first woman of the Mono tribe to earn an MFA in Motion Pictures and Television Production from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Motion Pictures and Television Production, and the first Native American woman to make a film about the Native American people of California.

Willow was not able to find contact information for Orie at first, but momentum built after sharing an excerpt of the film during AMIA’s Archival Screening Night in 2022. In January 2023, Willow and Orie finally connected, and in collaboration with Krista Riggs, director of the Madera County Library, they began to apply for grants to reintroduce Orie’s film to the public. Over the next two years, they received two grants: a Basic Preservation Grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to restore Colliding Worlds, and a “Humanities for All” grant from California Humanities to support the premiere of the restoration, set for October 2026. The premiere will be in Madera County and will focus on living culture, creating bridges across multiple generations and multiple tribes.