Badger Creek

Documentary Short | Randy Vasquez & Jonathan Skurnik

Badger Creek is a half-hour documentary portrait of a Blackfeet (Pikuni) family, the Mombergs, who live on the lower Blackfeet Reservation in Montana near the banks of Badger Creek. In addition to running a prosperous ranching business, they practice a traditional Blackfeet cultural lifestyle that sustains and nourishes them, including sending their children to a Blackfeet language immersion school, participating in Blackfeet spiritual ceremonies and maintaining a Blackfeet worldview. The film takes us through a year in the life of the family, and through four seasons of the magnificent and traditional territory of the Pikuni Nation.

27 minutes

Release: May 2017

JONATHAN SKURNIK

Producer/Director

Jonathan is a filmmaker, visual artist, educator and activist living in Southern California. At age nine, Jonathan made the first in a series of animated and stop-motion films with his trusty Minolta Super 8 camera. At Dartmouth College, he studied film and art history, then lived in Italy for a year, working as an art guard in Venice and as an English teacher and TV camera person in Verona. Back in Brooklyn, Jonathan worked as an outdoor educator, journalist, literary magazine editor and computer specialist. These skills served him well when he returned to his passion for filmmaking in his late 20s.

Randy Vasquez

Producer/Writer

Since debuting on television in 1984, Vasquez has made several appearances in TV series, most notably as Marcos in Acapulco H.E.A.T. and as Gunnery Sergeant Victor Galindez in JAG. In 1998, he was cast as bartender Paolo Kaire on Love Boat: The Next Wave. In 2002, he moved into film direction with Testimony, a documentary about Salvadorean activist Maria Guardado. In 2005, he directed a comedic drama titled Perceptions. In 2009, Vasquez returned to UCLA, where he earned a bachelor's degree in American Indian Studies. His 2011 film The Thick Dark Fog won the Best Documentary award at the 36th annual American Indian Film Festival.[3] In 2017, he directed a third documentary, Badger Creek, a film about a Blackfeet Nation family.