Online Screening Series: "SURVIVANCE"

Program:

[untitled & unlabeled]
Terry J. Jones
U.S.A. / 3:26 / 2016 / sound / colour / English

Extractions
Thirza Cuthand
Canada / 15:12 / 2019 / sound / colour & b/w / English

Activate NDN Consciousness
Natalie King
Canada / 6:06 / 2019 / sound / colour / English

Class Order Family Tribe
Rob Fatal
U.S.A. / 26:00 / 2016

Laundry Day
JJ Neepin & Justina Neepin
Canada / 3:00 / 2017 / sound / colour / English

ada
Lindsay McIntyre
Canada / 13:00 / 2011 / sound / colour / No dialogue

Positions
Justin Ducharme
Canada / 12:00 / 2018 / English

Fluid Bound
Rob Fatal
united states / 7:39 / 2021 / sound / colour / english and spanish
 

About the Films:

[untitled & unlabeled]
Terry J. Jones

In this very personal experimental work, director Terry Jones reflects upon the moment he was told he was "different" and how that left an imprint on the narrative of his life.

Terry Jones is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. He grew up and is currently living on the Seneca territory in western New York State and is a member of the wolf clan. Jones has a passion for sharing his Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) history and culture through his film works. He strives to find a balance between entertaining and educating his audiences. Terry’s film works have screened all over the world including the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto where his films “Empire State,” “Soup for My Brother,” “[untitled & unlabeled]” and “Ode to the Nine” had their international premieres.

Extractions
Thirza Cuthand

A personal film about Canada's extraction industry and its detrimental effects on the land and Indigenous peoples. This film parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension Industry currently operating in Canada which is responsible for putting more Indigenous children into foster care than were in Residential Schools. As the filmmaker reviews her life and how these Industries have affected her, she also reflects on having her own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.

Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1978, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 she has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Outfest in Los Angeles, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. Her work has also exhibited at galleries including the Mendel in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She completed her BFA majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005, and her Masters of Arts in Media Production at Ryerson University in 2015. In 1999 she was an artist in residence at Videopool and Urban Shaman in Winnipeg, where she completed Through The Looking Glass. In 2012 she was an artist in residence at Villa K. Magdalena in Hamburg, Germany, where she completed Boi Oh Boi. In 2015 she was commissioned by ImagineNATIVE to make 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99. She was also commissioned to make Thirza Cuthand Is An Indian Within The Meaning Of The Indian Act by VIMAF and Queer Arts Festival in 2017. In 2018 she was commissioned to make the video Reclamation by Cinema Politica in the Documentary Futurism Next 150 project. In the summer of 2016 they began working on a 2D video game called A Bipolar Journey based on her experience learning and dealing with her bipolar disorder. It showed at ImagineNATIVE and she is planning to further develop it. She has also written three feature screenplays and has performed at Live At The End Of The Century in Vancouver, Queer City Cinema’s Performatorium in Regina, and 7a*11d in Toronto. In 2017 she won the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. She is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. She is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.

Activate NDN Consciousness
Natalie King

Activate NDN Consciousness combines found footage of harmful Indigenous portrayals with contemporary NDN protest and revolt.

Natalie King is a queer Anishinaabekwe artist, facilitator and member of Timiskaming First Nation. King’s practice ranges from drawing, painting, and installation as well as community engagement and activism. Often involving portrayals of femme identities, King’s works are about embracing the ambiguity and multiplicities of identity within the indigenous queer femme experience. King’s arts practice and facilitation work operates from a firmly critical, decolonizing, equity-oriented, non-oppressive, and future-bound perspective, capturing the realities of lived lives through frameworks of desire and survivance.

Class Order Family Tribe
Rob Fatal

"Class Order Family Tribe" is a 26-minute experimental documentary about my my Native American [Ute, Apache, Pueblo] family's shifting strategies for survival after leaving the reservation and moving to Central California in the 1950s. Moreover it is a look at heterosexuality, machismo and binary gender roles as strategies for survival and how in my new native generation queerness and gender fluidity are new forms of survival. This silent film is told exclusively through 8mm film shot by my native family in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I insert myself into the film as a textual narrator creating a link between my ancestors and my own life with campy, melodramatic, surreal overtones. The 8mm footage in this film is rare and needs to be preserved and seen. Traditionally 8mm film of this era documenting Native Americans is shot from a white American / European / Canadian perspective, as such Mi Familia 2 stands as a striking contrast as self-authored native representation and de-colonial/post-colonial gesture.

Roberto Fatal is a filmmaker, storyteller, story keeper. They come from Rarámuri, Southern Ute, and Spanish ancestors and Mexican-American culture. Their Queer, gender fluid, Mestize/Mixed identity informs the sci-fi, apocalyptic films they make. Their work centers on humans who sit at the intersections of time, space and culture. From this unique vantage point, these characters can bridge divides, see all sides, find new paths forward and recall multiple histories long forgotten. The mixed people of Fatal’s stories can connect us deeply to an undercurrent of humanity that we often look past in a world that is increasingly divided. Survival, intersectional identity, perseverance, love, empathy, community, connection and creation are at the heart of their characters and films.

Fatal is a Sundance Film Institute Native Film Fellow Alumni. Their work is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center and has been screened internationally at festivals including BFI Flare, Outsider Fest, Fringe! Queer Arts and Film Festival and Frameline.

Laundry Day
JJ Neepin

JJ retells the story of a dream her late grandmother had when she was a young woman. That a simple chore of hanging laundry, that our dreams can have a deeper meaning than we originally thought.

Jenna (JJ) is an Indigenous DGC Director and Writer living/working in Winnipeg, Manitoba. JJ along with her sister/Producer Justina Neepin run their production company JJNeepinFilms INC. Both are members of the Fox Lake Cree Nation. JJ has written and directed several documentary short films including CBC's Headdress that had its world premiere at the 2017 Hot Docs Film Festival. She has also directed several episodes of various documentary television programs. JJ has training/apprenticeship in Directing via the Women in View 5 in Focus: Indigenous, Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television's Women Directors Program, and the Women in the Director's Chair (WIDC) - Story & Leadership program. In between gigs JJ writes screenplays and teaches the occasional Intro to Documentary workshops for the National Screen Institute of Canada.

ada
Lindsay McIntyre

An observational video portrait of an Inuk elder, patiently knitting. A study of the passage of time.

FAVA Award for Outstanding Documentary, 2012

Lindsay McIntyre is a film artist with an MFA from Concordia and a BFA from the University of Alberta who generally prefers to do things the hard way. She applies her interest in film chemistry, analogue technologies and structure to make award-winning short 16mm films and expanded cinema performances. Her film works are often processed-based, involve documentary and experimental techniques, and she even makes her own 16mm film with handmade silver gelatin emulsion. Interested simultaneously in the apparatus of cinema, portraiture, representation and personal histories, she bridges gaps in collective experience and remains dedicated to integrating theory and practice, form and content. Internationally, she has contributed a body of knowledge to the practice of silver gelatin emulsion making and coating for motion picture film and teaches this and other celluloid-based practices around the world. She was honoured with the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation (2017) and was named the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award recipient for Excellence in Media Arts by the Canada Council for the Arts (2013). She is Assistant Professor of Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design on unceded Coast Salish territories and is of Inuk and settler Scottish decent. 

Positions
Justin Ducharme

A simple and naturalistic approach to a day in the life of a two-spirit, male sex worker as he visits his clients. Positions is an unapologetic and realist exploration of sexual desire, the quest for financial stability, and the pursuit of agency over one’s own body.

Audience Award for Best Short, Fairy Tales Film Festival, 2019.

Justin Ducharme is a filmmaker, writer, dancer, and curator from the small Métis community of St. Ambroise on Treaty 1 Territory. He is a graduate from Vancouver Film School, and the writer/director of three short narrative films including POSITIONS (2018). He has been jigging since the age of 7, performing with The St. Ambroise Youth Steppers and the Louis Riel Métis Dancers. His poetry has been featured in Sex Worker Wisdom and PRISM international magazine, and he is co-editor of Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers' Poetry with Amber Dawn. He currently lives and works on Unceded Coast Salish Territory.

Fluid Bound
Rob Fatal

An experimental gender fluid, mestize-Indigenous film that uses text, sound design, crude animation, and bondage rope to meditate on the complex, generations-old relationships and battles between our skin and our souls.

Roberto Fatal is a filmmaker, storyteller, story keeper. They come from Rarámuri, Southern Ute, and Spanish ancestors and Mexican-American culture. Their Queer, gender fluid, Mestize/Mixed identity informs the sci-fi, apocalyptic films they make. Their work centers on humans who sit at the intersections of time, space and culture. From this unique vantage point, these characters can bridge divides, see all sides, find new paths forward and recall multiple histories long forgotten. The mixed people of Fatal’s stories can connect us deeply to an undercurrent of humanity that we often look past in a world that is increasingly divided. Survival, intersectional identity, perseverance, love, empathy, community, connection and creation are at the heart of their characters and films.

Fatal is a Sundance Film Institute Native Film Fellow Alumni. Their work is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center and has been screened internationally at festivals including BFI Flare, Outsider Fest, Fringe! Queer Arts and Film Festival and Frameline.