I am not going to make a film to please an audience. I make a film to make changes and to have recognition for the people. – Alanis Obomsawin  Throughout her life, well before taking up the camera, Alanis was an activist, taking a stand against injustices perpetrated against others. She witnessed a changing world […]

Childhood has a lot of great memories. We lived on the Six Nations Reserve where there were plenty of empty fields and lots of trees. At the time, I didn’t give too much thought to being an artist, but now I feel I rely on those memories constantly: the sun beating down on my fresh […]

The Centers of Somewhere.  I’m a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin (enrolled with a number) and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians (not enrolled at all), and those qualifiers and what they mean for me oscillate as well. It’s certainly a part of who I am, to me and […]

I started filming things on my phone over a decade ago. I like to capture stuff; it’s really healing for me. For a long time, I was working in New York City in fashion, which involved a lot of preparation of presentations and mood boards, so creating visuals was already in my system, but I […]

In October 1972, the English Program Animation Studio launched the Arctic Film Workshop in Cape Dorset, an Arctic centre for culture and events. Training sessions in animation were held there, with the participation of a dozen young Inuit. These budding animators quickly started producing films. The workshop was called Sikusilarmiut, which in English means “the […]

When Cecilia Vicuña came to Manhattan in 1980, she had no plans to stay—but for Vicuña, an artist in exile from Pinochet’s Chile, plans didn’t matter much. She had been in the city for less than a week when she crossed paths with an Argentine painter and moved into his unfinished loft in Tribeca. There […]

Siberia occupies roughly seventy-seven percent of Russian territory and consists of different federal subjects: republics, krais, oblasts, and autonomous okrugs. The Republic of Sakha Yakutia is situated within the Siberian region and has eight recognized ethnic groups, five of which are classified minor Indigenous according to an official calculus devised by the Russian government. This […]

Domus is a house of cinema which is about the many homes that cinema can make for itself—on a table, in the air, on walls—proving well before her feature-length Ste. Anne how well Vermette knows the moveability of spaces that overlap to form a domain: its perimeter is affective, familial, territorial, nebulous, cultural, ancestral (the […]

I am a listener. My belief is that sound work cannot be made in isolation. These are acoustic, conceptual responses to land; they seek to acknowledge the people who have history in those places. There is a pedagogical and a generative feedback loop within these land-based practices. Composition and improvisation are the foundations of my […]

Over the past three decades Dana Claxton has become widely known for an expansive, multidisciplinary approach to artmaking that encompasses film, video, photography, and performance that is informed by a remarkable family history and an extraordinarily cosmopolitan range of lived experience. More specifically, her work combines contemporary technologies and aesthetic strategies drawn from disparate idioms—from […]

The productions of Victor Masayesva Jr., an independent videomaker working from his home on the Hopi Reservation, emerges from a history of intrusive visitation to the reservation by filmmakers and photographers since the beginning of the century. In his work, he presents aspects of the culture in terms unimpeded by non-Hopi preconceptions of what is […]

Monnet’s entire career has been about bridging disparate identities. Her installations merge modern art with Indigenous tradition. For her 2017 exhibition Memories We Shouldn’t Speak Of, Monnet made sculptures from hair dripping in tar—a nod towards the tar sands and Indigenous beliefs that hair holds onto memories. Her short films often feature Indigenous people going […]

The Florida Seminoles are widely known as “the unconquered.” They are the only Native American tribe never to have signed a peace treaty with the United States government, with which they fought three separate wars in the nineteenth century. Throughout that period, they were pushed deeper and deeper into the Everglades. In new, inhospitable territory, […]

This new Indigenous Cinema is about pushing ourselves as Indigenous people, to question what it means to be Indigenous in 2019 and into the future. How will we thrive, how will we succeed, how will we incorporate technology and storytelling in our lives to honor and propel us forward as Indigenous people? This means creating […]

A year later, the English Program—again with the support of the Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs—launched a documentary workshop in Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit), simply called the Frobisher Bay Workshop. It is hard to confirm exactly how many Inuit filmmakers participated in this workshop and how many films came out of it. But we […]

Against the exaltation of the image over sound, and the gradual isolation of violence, Ingrávidos proposes a relational image with political determination. Images disintegrate, separate from the sound, multiply, and stutter, connecting with each other and cracking up visual grammar like an egg. The interaction between the images dissociates their communal narrative practices, opening up […]

My mission is to authorize Indigenous experience in the canon of art history that has heretofore erased us from view…. Museums across the continent hold in their collections countless paintings that depict and celebrate the European settlers’ expansion and “discovery” of the North American landscape, but very few, if any … show the dispossession and […]

In 1989, [Anastasia] Lapsui met Markku Lehmuskallio, a documentary filmmaker who had come from Finland to shoot a film in the Soviet Arctic. […] Lehmuskallio’s debuts in cinema were peculiar: working as a regional forester, he started to make instructional films in the 1970s to show farmers how to set out pine seedlings. He continued […]

I was a visual artist before I started working in film and I didn’t come to the medium the way many filmmakers do, which is with the intent of trying to tell stories. I came to it more as a visual artist who wanted to work with the material in my hands. The very first […]

These films centre on issues that concern me: movement and migration, tensions between generations, indigenous identity, rural and urban landscapes. In many ways, these matters are central to Bolivia’s contemporary experience. While making the films, I was less interested in storytelling and more focused on evoking a certain place or moment while making use of […]

Do you want to realize your fullest potential? Be your truest self? Act with confidence? Attract abundance? Alleviate anxiety? Experience clarity? Know your purpose? Be the change you want to see? Be truly present? Experience real freedom? Change the world? Be a part of the solution?  On some level, we all want to feel this […]

In the first film of the series Extractions (2019, Canada), Cuthand tackles Canada’s resource extraction industry, but filters it through a deeply personal perspective as he offers narration about his youth as a queer Indigenous kid and considers what resources were offered or denied to him. Even as he reflects on trying to honor the […]

Our understanding of the past is always evolving, and the representation of Indigenous Peoples has changed dramatically over the decades. You get these government-sponsored films from the ’50s, subtly or not so subtly racist, that promote residential schooling. And then you’ll find recent footage by Inuit filmmakers that presents a completely different perspective. It’s a […]

A lot of what I do is starting with something simple like a photograph, then doing relatively simple techniques to expose the magic that can happen in a process. I think of magic as happenstance or accidental things that end up being really beautiful and changing the work completely, which is usually something that you […]