A good year for films at IMAG festival

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The Indigenous Media Arts Group held its annual IMAGeNation Film and Video Festival in Vancouver Feb. 17 to 20, providing an opportunity to Aboriginal film-makers to screen their work while offering the movie-going public a chance to see the world from an Aboriginal perspective.

It's the seventh year IMAG has held the event. President Zoe Hopkins said this year was a banner year for Aboriginal film-makers, with no shortage of work for the festival to choose from to screen.

"There has been a little boom, I guess in the past two years of training programs, especially with the advent of the Aboriginal People's Television Network. There's tons of little programs running around the country, and several in Vancouver alone, so there's way more emerging work.

"There's probably about the same amount of people who would be considered senior artists.

There's probably the same amount of work, because it takes awhile for emerging artists to advance to that point in their career. But this year we received more submissions than any other year," Hopkins said.

This year's festival offerings included a much talked about short called Two Cars, One Night by Maori director Taika Waititi, 28, of New Zealand. The film was nominated for an Oscar. Hopkins was with Waititi at the Sundance Film Festival when he heard the news about his nomination.

"So I knew that, yes, we had to have that on the program, the Maori Oscar nominee."

Waititi was on hand for the screening of his film at the IMAGeNation festival, a more laid-back affair than his time among the stars on Oscar night Feb. 27 where he lost his bid for Hollywood's top prize to Andrea Arnold for her film WASP.

Duane Aucoin played emcee on opening night of IMAGeNation where the group honored actor Gary Farmer.

Duane Aucoin was also the curator for a festival stream of films that examined the many faces of intimacy within the Aboriginal community.

"There's two-spirited material," he told Raven's Eye Feb. 17. "There's the relationship with the government, nature and everything, so it's all different forms of that love dance."

Aucoin had a number of films screened over the course of the festival, including one called Queer as Chief.

"Just my play on Queer as Folk; just rezifying it," he said. Another of his films, called Urban Indian, was shown. Aucoin said it was his interpretation of urban Indian life and experience.

"The good and the bad, was what I showed. Aboriginal people in Vancouver just doing everyday things, on the phone, playing tennis, crossing the street, but in full regalia, West Coast regalia. And what I wanted to say with that is that no matter where you are, no matter what you do, you take the spirit of your people with you."

The festival is the core offering from IMAG, but the non-profit group also offers a number of training programs throughout the year.

Last summer IMAG held a week-long program where students learned how to film, hand-process and edit Super 8 film. There was also a basic skills program for young people and a professional development program for people working in the arts who wanted to use film as a tool to develop their art, said Hopkins.

The festival, however, is the project that takes up the most amount of IMAG's time and effort each year.

"We start working on the festival on a daily full-time basis in October, November, where we're starting to get submissions and people start viewing the submissions; the programming committee gets established. We start putting together programs and start raising money. It's very expensive to put on a film festival," Hopkins said.

The film festival provides a unique platform for Aboriginal film-makers' work, she said.

"The Vancouver International Film Festival in 1998, they programmed seven Aboriginal films, and none the year before and none the year before that. And I don't think they programmed any last year, so it's really important to have a film festival that is pecifically for Aboriginal film-makers, because there's just not the opportunity out there to have your work screened. So I think it's a really good jumping off place for film-makers to come in, look at all the work, and just to be able to put it beside their film's name, that it was screened at IMAGeNation. Having a list of film festivals behind your film is really important for a piece of work," Hopkins said.

Aucoin said the festival is great exposure for up and coming new talent.

"I know IMAG has done a lot for me personally in my own personal work, and also as an emerging artist."

He said there are not too many places where Aboriginal people starting off in the industry can share their work with the community and their people and get acknowledgement and support.