imagineNATIVE smashes attendance and impact records

Figures are in for the 14th annual imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and attendance was up by 20 per cent over 2012. Areas of significant growth included the festival’s exhibition attendance, with more than 8,000 visitors at four different shows, capped by the success of the festival’s first official art crawl of contemporary Indigenous new media art. imagineNATIVE also saw an exponential increase in international attendance, with more than 10 per cent of attendees coming from outside of Canada, a nine per cent increase from 2012. Fuelled by this growth – and a dramatic increase in travel package purchases – imagineNATIVE’s visitors contributed an estimated $6.5 million to the Ontario economy, an increase of 18 per cent from 2012. From an artistic angle, imagineNATIVE’s programming showcased 127 works from 15 countries and 49 different Indigenous nations. A record 80 artists were in attendance to represent their works to festival audiences.