I’ve been hearing about the imagineNATIVE film festival in Toronto for years. I really wanted to go the last couple of years, but was either shooting or editing on a film and couldn’t go. This year, I decided come hell or high water, I am going to imagineNATIVE!!! I’ve been to several film festivals now around the world, and I figured it’s time to check out this amazing aboriginal film festival in my own country.

Imagine (pardon the pun) my surprise when I found out that the festival wanted to show two of my short films! One of my short films is “Lumaajuuq – The Blind Boy and the Loon”, which is an animation that I did with the National Film Board of Canada, and the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation:

http://www.imaginenative.org/filmpreview.php?id=397

The other is “Inuit High Kick”, a super-slow-motion short film I did with Inuit Communication Systems Ltd.

http://www.imaginenative.org/filmpreview.php?id=440

This festival was KICKASS, and I highly recommend it to other aboriginal filmmakers. Everybody was so tunnganaq (welcoming), it felt like hanging out with family, and it was so easy to meet new people and get to know each other. The panels were very informative, and I learned a lot from hearing about other filmmakers creative processes. I actually got to see some fantastic films, which is surprisingly hard to do sometimes at film festivals, because you get so busy with meetings and panels, pitching, etc. EVERYBODY has to see Boy, a film by Taika Waititi. If you love Flight of the Conchords, you’ll love Boy. Also, Zacharias Kunuk’s new film Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change is (as always) ground-breaking and mind blowing. Kudos to Zach and Ian Mauro for a film that’s going to shake up the scientific world.