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Indigenous Cinema and the Limits of Auteurism
The Criterion Collection
A confession: before I made my first trip, a few years ago, to the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, I had seen precious little Indigenous cinema. The average cinephile in the West watches predominantly films made by white people, mostly men. Whatâs more, as I discuss in my accompanying essay, film cultureâs long-running love affair with the âauteurâ does not always do justice to Indigenous cinema. Itâs a problem that is often reinforced by film festivalsâespecially the largest and most prestigious ones. ImagineNATIVE, which was founded in 1999, was a revelation to me because it presented work that I rarely encountered at other festivals, and it did so without foregrounding the figure of the auteur. Further, the festival challenged the boundaries of âIndigenous cinemaâ by showcasing work that spanned an astonishing variety of forms, genres, and originating communities.
Jason Ryle, former executive director of imagineNATIVE, once said that his dream was for a time when there would be no need for the broad umbrella label âIndigenous cinema.â Instead, we might have âAnishinaabe cinema, or Inuit cinema or MÄori cinema.â But until then, Ryle argued, âwhen we speak about Indigenous cinema, it should be like when one speaks about European cinema: itâs a body of nations telling stories but within that thereâs so much diversity and so much depth.â Having experienced this diversity firsthand at imagineNATIVE each year, I hope that it becomes an essential destination for cinephiles.
To learn more about the festivalâs history, vision, and initiatives, I got in touch with Niki Little, who is Anishininew/English from Kistiganwacheeng (Garden Hill First Nation) and has been artistic director of imagineNATIVE since 2019.