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MONDAY,OCTOBER21,2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAIL O A
F
or some, the ImagineNATIVE
Film and Media Arts Festival
is like Christmas in October.
Just ask the organization’s board
members, directors and partici-
pants from the festival’s past and
present. Over the years, the an-
nual Toronto-based gathering of
Indigenous films and filmmakers
has colloquially been referred to
as “Native Christmas.”
“You see old friends who feel
like family. And we’re just com-
ing together to celebrate our
communities and nations and al-
so, importantly, our artists and
the work they’ve made,” says out-
going executive director Jason
Ryle.
Founded in 1999, the festival
has grown from its grassroots be-
ginnings but has never lost its
community-focused touch. Two
decades out and ImagineNATIVE
has maintained the distinct vi-
sion of its founders Cynthia Lick-
ers-Sage and Toronto artist-run
centre Vtape.
It’s still Indigenous-run, fo-
cused on international emerging
filmmakers and carving space for
more Indigenous artistic content
- it’s just now the largest Indige-
nous film and media arts festival
in the world. In 2003, just shy of
2,000 people attended. Today, it’s
in the range of 30,000 attendees
annually.
This year, the festival received
its highest number of submis-
sions ever, with more than 400
submissions, from films to video
games, virtual reality to interac-
tive web series. The opening-
night film, Zacharias Kunuk’sOne
Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk,
will screen at Hot Docs Ted Rog-
ers Cinema.
One-hundred-and-twenty films
will screen at the TIFF Bell Light-
box during the rest of the six-day
festival.
There’s a retrospective of the
films of Victor Masayesva Jr., a
Hopi Elder filmmaker whose
work counteracts the exploita-
tive nature of the colonial docu-
mentation of his people. The oth-
er special presentations include
some heavyweights from TIFF:
Alanis Obomsawin’s 53rd film,
Jordan River Anderson, the Messen-
ger; Elle Maija-Tailfeathers and
Kathleen Hepburn’sThe Body Re-
members When The World Broke
Openand Jeff Barnaby’sBlood
Quantum.
Although ImagineNATIVE has
grown substantially over the past
two decades, it still regards itself
as a place where emerging Indig-
enous filmmakers can have can-
did access to masters such as
Obomsawin.
“There’s this casualness,
there’s this openness around the
festival. You’re connecting with
your kin, you’re kind of nourish-
ing each other in different ways,”
says Niki Little, the recently ap-pointed artistic director. It’s her
first festival as part of the team,
although she’s attended since- She appreciates the way the
festival gives Indigenous film-
makers the chance to screen their
films for Indigenous audiences
that get it. “It’s different to be able
to have your work engaged with
by an Indigenous public, like you
don’t have to provide a context
for what we’re talking about.”
The community that congre-
gates at ImagineNATIVE is vast.
There’s Inuit, Mohawk, Cree, Sa-
mi, Maori films and countless
others in a myriad of languages.
From New Zealand to Peru,
there’s now a diversity of Indige-
nous cinemas that Ryle says nev-
er existed 20 years ago.
The international hub of the
festival provides a space for reci-
procal inspiration between film-
makers from different nations.
“That’s part of why it’s been so
good at fostering talent, it was al-
ways looking at a global view-
point,” says Jesse Wente, a former
ImagineNATIVE board member
and current director of the Indig-
enous Screen Office.
Back in its early, scrappier
days, ImagineNATIVE bounced
around from Innis College at the
University of Toronto to the Al
Green Theatre in the Miles Nadal
Jewish Community Centre before
finding its current home at the
Lightbox in 2010.
The move was important to
Ryle, who started as a board
member in 2002 and became ex-
ecutive director in 2010, as he
wanted to honour the works. “It’s
very important that Indigenous-
made work has the opportunity
to play in a place like the Light-
box, with its state-of-the-art pro-
jection and lighting and comfort-
able seating.”
In the early 2000s, program-
ming an Indigenous film festival
held as many opportunities as
challenges. New perspectives
were being listened to, exciting
new artists were emerging but it
was more of a hunt to find films
to screen.
Wente recalls a time when
you’d be lucky if a dozen Indige-
nous films were produced in a
given year.
The festival reached “dizzying
heights of success” for Ryle when
it hit year seven, because he
heard most new film festivals
didn’t last beyond five or six
years. For Wente, the big break-
through was in his final year,
when attendance doubled from
8,000 people in 2006 to 16,000 in
2007, thanks to a partnership
with the Royal Ontario Museum.
Now that the organization has
a team of international program-
mers, it has shifted its artistic pol-
icy annually to reflect the com-
munities’ needs and created a
protocol guide to teach non-In-
digenous and Indigenous film-
makers how to respectfully en-
gage with communities, elders
and lands.
The festival has also started a
three-year partnership with Net-
flix to help support the profes-
sional development of directors,
screenwriters and producers, and
to get more Indigenous-run pro-
ductions off the ground.
The trajectory of the festival
has always been tied to the in-creasing demand for the particu-
lar content it highlights. The In-
digenous film and television in-
dustries look very different than
they did in 1999.
“ImagineNATIVE has been one
of the few access points, certainly
anywhere in Canada, to this type
of diverse Indigenous content,”
Ryle says.
Indigenous youth today can
see themselves represented on
screen in a multitude of ways that
didn’t exist for previous genera-
tions. Telefilm Canada invested
$16-million in Indigenous films
over the past three years, more
than at any other point in its his-
tory.
ImagineNATIVE, along with
other Indigenous film festivals,
played a major role in growing
the art form globally.
“It’s part of what festivals do
best, when they’re doing it right,
they help grow an entire sort of
culture,” Wente says.
That culture came with hard
work, advocacy, activism, policy
meetings with the provincial and
federal governments and with an
unwavering commitment to its
mandate. “I’m sitting here, the
executive director of the Indige-
nous Screen Office, would that
even be a thing I could say if there
wasn’t an ImagineNATIVE?”
There’s widespread interest in
Indigenous content across Cana-
da, and not just from Indigenous
audiences. As the attendees of
the festival become increasingly
diverse and the works proliferate
into the mainstream, Imagine-
NATIVE remains founded on
ideas of collective responsibility
and making space for Indigenous
storytellers.
The core of the organization is
about bolstering the Indigenous
film community as the festival
grows.
“You have to ensure that this
community comes with you so
that we can occupy this space to-
gether,” Little says.SpecialtoTheGlobeandMailImagineNATIVErunsOct.22to
inToronto(imaginenative.ca).ImagineNATIVEfilmfestivalisstillgrowing,20yearslater
Eventdrawsaround
30,000peopleannually
andreceivesmore
than400submissions,
butithasneverlost
itscommunitytouch
KELSEYADAMS
ZachariasKunuk’sfilmOneDayintheLifeofNoahPiugattuk,with
ApayataKotierkasNoah,seenabove,willbetheopening-nightfilmfor
thisyear’sImagineNATIVEfilmfest.ISUMADISTRIBUTIONINTERNATIONALNEWS |