TORONTO — The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) announced today seven NFB works will be featured during the online imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, which takes place October 20-25. The NFB is also partnering on an industry panel for Indigenous virtual reality creators.
Michelle Latimer’s award-winning documentary Inconvenient Indian (pictured, 90th Parallel Productions/NFB, 90 minutes) will be joined by six NFB French-language short films at the festival. Inconvenient Indian won both the People’s Choice Documentary Award and the Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The documentary brings to life Indigenous intellectual and master storyteller Thomas King’s brilliant dismantling of North America’s colonial narrative in his best-selling book The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.
The six short NFB films being presented as part of the imagineNATIVE festival’s Francophone Indigenous Focus include:
- Children of the Nomad (NFB/Nadagam Films) by Evelyne Papatie, a member of the Kitcisakik Anicinape community
- Délia 9 to 5 (NFB/Nadagam Films) by Délia Gunn, a member of the Kitcisakik Anicinape community
- The Fake Calendar by Atikamekw director Meky Ottawa
- I Like Girls by Diane Obomsawin, a graphic artist and animator of Abenaki descent
- Mobilize by Algonquin multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet
- Red Path by Atikamekw director Thérèse Ottawa
In addition, the NFB is partnering on “Digital Development Day: The Digital Pitch”, a panel in which key industry members will offer feedback on creative documentary VR proposals from six emerging and mid-career Indigenous artists. The pitch panel takes place October 21 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. ET, and is part of Open Immersion II, a virtual lab featuring mentorship, training and creative ideation, led by the NFB Ontario Studio, the CFC Media Lab and JustFilms/Ford Foundation.
For more information about the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, please visit festival.imaginenative.org.
