Lindsay McIntyre

Thousandsuns
Cinema

Lindsay McIntyre (Inuk) is a filmmaker and artist of Inuk and settler descent born on Treaty Six territory in Edmonton, Alberta. She works primarily with analogue film, exploring place, portraiture, and personal histories. Her current research and creation projects link land use to autoethnographic explorations of intergenerational trauma, cultural knowledge, and resource extraction in the circumpolar north. She received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Alberta (2001), and an MFA in Film Production from Concordia University (2010). She also studied Inuktitut at the Language Learning Center, University of Washington (2021). She has completed 40+ films since 2000. Her short documentaries, experimental films, and expanded cinema performances have been exhibited widely at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Anthology Film Archives, International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Dunlop Art Gallery, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Vancouver Art Gallery, Black Maria Film Festival, Casa del Popolo and La Sala Rossa, Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, Bienal de Imagen de la Movimiento, Marion Scott Gallery, Asinabka Film and Media Arts Festival, and Glasgow Film Festival. She is the recipient of Best Experimental Film, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival (2012); a Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Excellence in Media Arts, Canada Council for the Arts (2013); the Spirit of Helen Award, Outstanding Achievement in Production Design, Outstanding Short Documentary, and Outstanding Experimental Film from the Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta (2016); a REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award, Hnatyshyn Foundation (2017); an Award for Excellence, Docs Without Borders (2020); and the Feature Film Award from Women in the Director’s Chair (2021) for her forthcoming feature The Words We Can’t Speak. McIntyre is a Media City Film Festival Chrysalis Fellow (2021–2022). She is Assistant Professor of Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She lives and works in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territories.

ONLINE SCREENING DATES: January 9 – January 30, 2023

FILMS IN THIS PROGRAM: seeing her, 3.5 min, 2021; bernard gaspé, 5 min, 2013; all-around junior male, 7.5 min, 2012

This series is co-selected and presented with COUSIN collective and is generously funded by a Digital Now grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

seeing her, 3.5 min, 2021

Visibly stunning, seeing her is a silent portrait of the filmmaker’s great-grandmother’s amauti. This analogue animation weaves the beaded textures that give space to the labour, skill, and memories that this amauti holds. – imagineNATIVE

bernard gaspé, 5 min, 2013

Rendered in a dream-like pink hue, bernard gaspé uses layered in-camera juxtapositions to present a journey through the neglected architecture of the train tracks in Montréal’s Mile End. – L’Alternativa

all-around junior male, 7.5 min, 2012

A hand-crafted experimental portrait of a young Nunamiut athlete, Sean Uquqtuq, through his performance of a challenging traditional Inuit game—the one-foot high kick.

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 piece of film that I came across was when I was playing a game with a friend of mine while living in New York in 1999. It was called the “Up and Down” game and the two of us would walk around the filthy streets of Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Queens, wherever we were, and find things on the street and then take them home and make other things out of them. So the person who got on belly-button level and down always got the richest material because you could find things like fish heads, which you could then encase in a rubber mould. The upper levels would only get you unexciting things like paper and plastics. One of those days I was lucky enough to find a ratty little mess of 16mm black-and-white film under a tree. I had never seen or touched film before. I didn’t really know what it was, but I could see the images on it (I think I figured out later that it was a guy talking about farming or something). So I brought it home and tried to do some things with it. – Lindsay McIntyre

Read an interview with Lindsay McIntyre in Border Crossings.

Watch an artist talk with Lindsay McIntyre at Griffin Art Project.

All stills, photographs, and artwork courtesy © tiny moving pictures/Lindsay McIntyre. Screening co-presented with Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) and Art Windsor Essex (AWE).