People expect great things from Nanobah Becker. The Navajo filmmaker is only 32 years old, and she graduated from Columbia University’s M.F.A. film program just last May, but already, Talking Stick, a newsletter for and about Native American artists, has described her as “well-spoken, focused, and honest to her personal vision”; the author of that article added, “I am eagerly anticipating the fulfillment of her dream and the foundation of an exciting future cultural institution.”

But if Becker shoulders the unseen weight of other people’s hopes, she does not appear to be saddled with anxiety about depicting their experiences. Conversion, her second short film, is an assured and shrewd assessment, in miniature, of the 20th century version of the historic aggression against Native Americans: conversion to Christianity. Set among the stark scrublands of a Navajo reservation, Conversion draws from real life–a middle-aged Navajo daughter must determine how to attempt to save her father, who is immobile and ailing after meeting Christian missionaries, who tell him to give up his medicine bag and adopt their God. Not to mention that a five-year-old girl on the reservation becomes fascinated by the missionaries and will not give up the photo of Jesus Christ the visitors handed out that has the following verse from the book of John on it: “That they might know thee, the only true god, and Jesus Christ, who thou hast sent.”

The incident involving the sick elder took place in the 1940s or 50s, according to what Becker’s mother once told her, but pinning down the specifics of when and to whom it happened are not nearly as relevant as the fact that the events that take place in Conversion are omnipresent in Native American life. “The whole idea of this other people coming in to your community, that’s pretty universal for Native people,” Becker explained. But the research for the script ended up being unexpectedly personal: Becker found archival recordings from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair that featured her grandfather performing Navajo chants and her brother-in-law found a film from the World’s Fair that featured her grandfather—that footage opens Conversion.

She planned Conversion’s three-and-a-half-day shoot from New York while she was still at Columbia. The shoot took place a half-hour from Cuba, New Mexico (population: 590), where cell phones did not function and every location required an outhouse. “Some of the roads aren’t really even roads,” Becker said.

Since completing her undergraduate work at Brown University, Becker has shuttled between the East Coast, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque, where she grew up. “I guess like a lot of teenagers, I wanted to leave home and learn a different life and I was good at school and that was the one thing that could get me somewhere,” Becker recalled. But as soon as she finished college, she returned home to work on the reservation at a Native American community college. “I feel most home in New Mexico,” she said, “but at the same time there’s a part of me that’s driven and tells me I can make it in L.A.”

Suspension is a piece of art consisting of a moving image. To describe it literally would give away the image you see, but could never give away the meaning because it is different for everyone.

"It's all [made] by intuition. It's really working with the material itself with sound and image until the magic happens. You try to keep your finger on it as long as possible," Provost said. The film is "probably trying to get close to the cosmos [laughs]-to all the big philosophical questions one can have. That's all. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who can write a lot of things about [the cosmos]. But I'm the one who works with the image. I can't work with the words."

As with the best art, Provost does not want to tell people what to think. Suspension is a silent film, concentrating on the purest element of the form: the image. Provost did make a soundtrack, but decided against an using sound as an emotional guideline.

The difficulty with films that can be considered in the vein of art or avant-garde or experimental (a veritable "sticks and stones" of labels) is that audiences often go into these films looking to confirm preconceived notions. For audiences to engage with Suspension, they simply need a willingness to walk into the theater with the sole intent of having an experience.

"I'm an artist before I'm a filmmaker. I'm very conscious I'm working with image and sound almost like a painter or a sculptor. Sometimes [my works] are more paintings or fine arts than they are films. Sometimes I make films like Plot Point where I'm questioning the codes of cinema that we are conditioned with. That's always something that comes back with all the works that I do. To try to move people [by] playing with the codes. They are confronted-they think about what kind of influence that we are conditioned with in 100 years."

"I edit on a very small screen and I see it as a painting. So every film, even if it is fiction, it has to work as much as a cinema experience or as poetry on a wall [laughs]. Oh my God! I'm in the bathroom looking at the toilet. I'm getting so deep."