"Shooting Indians...radically defines the role of place, public discussion and the meaning of place in Canadian documentary."

- David Hogarth, Documentary Television in Canada (McGill Univ. Press, 2003)

Spanning over a decade, from 1984 to 1996, Shooting Indians - A Journey with Jeffery Thomas is an ironic documentary journey full of quiet insights and surprising twists. Starting the film as a foreign student in 1984, Kazimi begins to unravel the hidden history of the land that he has chosen as his home

At one level, Shooting Indians is a portrait of Jeffrey Thomas, an Iroquois photographer. The film explores the influences on his life which led him to his career. It was the work of an American photographer from the turn of the century, Edward Curtis, which forced Thomas to closely examine how Native people had been photographed in the past. Thomas views Curtis' monumental work as a "mountain which must be crossed".

On another level is the irony of an Indian from India making a film on a North American Indian and this is woven throughout the fabric of the film.

Then there is Curtis, the enigmatic photographer who crisscrossed the North American West for thirty years documenting Native people at the turn of the century. Curtis' romantic images have seduced many viewers including the filmmaker, for whom these images are reminiscent of the Hollywood Westerns he grew up with in India.

In a surprising turn of events, the paths of Kazimi, Thomas and Curtis intersect on Vancouver Island and from this complex juxtaposition of past and present, the filmmaker and his subject, the photographer and his art, emerges not only a portrait of a talented photographer but a film that goes beyond stereotypes.

As in any journey, it is not the destination but the movement and its attendant unpredictability that reveals much about the subject the filmmaker and the people they meet along the way.

In the end Kazimi concludes - "The vanishing race has emerged from the shadows reborn, renewed and asserting its cultural survival. Aboriginal cultures, like all cultures including my own, have borrowed, incorporated and absorbed influences from all encounters, absorbing reviving and at times reinventing themselves. In the end what has vanished is my image of the authentic, imaginary, Red Indian."