Indigenous Creators Program: Our Craft Our Way

Stories authored and created from a First Nations perspective and voice have a unique power to shift minds, inspire change and move hearts around larger issues that affect people’s lives in adverse ways. It is a responsibility that all First Nations Creators carry long after we hear a cut on set, and when the festival circuit has ceased. It’s a difficult craft to take on board with cultural protocols, and community approval and trust, in order to tell underrepresented stories and to share tough truth-telling on screen. When the responsibility of sharing trauma is placed on those most affected by injustice, is this the only way to inspire change?

In this session, we are joined by Kimberley Benjamin (Re-imagining Our Futures), Karla Hart (Our Medicine), Jazz Money (WINHANGANHA), and Julian Brave NoiseCat (Sugarcane), as they discuss how to navigate genuine collaborations across documentary and factual storytelling. The panel of visionary creatives will discuss how to tackle tropes in nonfiction and break away from the expected to push formats further.

First Nations practitioners only

 

Image Credit: Image credit: Julian Brave NoiseCat competes at the Kamloopa Powwow held on the campus of the former Indian residential school where the first suspected graves of students were discovered in Canada. (Credit: Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)