TORONTO – Jesse Wente has been appointed director of Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office, a role he will assume starting February 1, 2018, it was announced today.
The ISO is an initiative first announced by the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage, at the Banff World Media Festival in June.
A film expert, broadcaster and cultural industries leader, Wente (pictured) has spent two decades working in the creative community and advocating for Indigenous rights. He has been director of film programmes at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for the past seven years, and has contributed to CBC Radio as a critic, reporter, and producer since 1996. He has served on numerous boards, including the Toronto Arts Council and the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival. He is Ojibwe from the Serpent River First Nation, born in Toronto.
His mandate as director will be to develop an approach to meet the ISO’s strategic objectives and manage its operations and then implement a long-term strategy supporting all levels of talent development, including short and feature script development; television and digital media and training. A key role of the office will be to facilitate relationships with broadcasters, distributors, training institutions and federal funders.
“I look forward to working with the stakeholders in the Indigenous Screen Office as well as my colleagues in the broader sector, to expand the reach and impact of Indigenous stories on screen and further the opportunities for Indigenous storytellers on all levels of production in Canada,” he said in the press release. “Now more than ever, the need for Indigenous narrative sovereignty is evident and I’m excited to work with the community of Indigenous creators to help grow our industry and amplify their voices.”
APTN, the CBC/SRC, the Canada Media Fund (CMF), Telefilm Canada, the CMPA, and the NFB all collaborated to support the Indigenous Screen Office. Associated partners include Bell Media, the Harold Greenberg Fund and Vice Studio Canada.
