From controversy swirling around Through Black Spruce to hearing Haida on film: TIFF insights from Jesse Wente
Jesse Wente is a film buff, and being Ojibwe himself, has a keen interest in Indigenous film.
He was the director of film programmes at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for seven years and has curated the film content at imagineNATIVE.
He is now the director of the new national Indigenous Screen Office and recently spent time checking out the latest Indigenous films screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.
One film that premiered that is getting mixed reactions online is Through Black Spruce, which is adapted from a book by Joseph Boyden, who has been at the centre of an ongoing debate about identity and cultural appropriation.
The film was produced by Tina Keeper, who is Cree, but because the writer and director are non-Indigenous, the film is facing criticism.
"Would I personally would have loved to have seen an Indigenous director and an Indigenous writer tackle that material? Sure, of course," said Wente.
"The question of Boyden is the one that, I think, really looms the most large over the production....It made for a complex set of emotions watching the movie earlier this week."
Despite having non-Indigenous people included on the film's cast, Wente said that audiences should recognize it was Tina Keeper who really "drove the production."
"It's a more complicated thing, because you want Indigenous producers to have the freedom when they attain a film to work with who they want," he said.
"It's not like suddenly there's a fully supportive Indigenous distribution model," he explained.
"There's a ton of points in the rollout of any screen content where you need collaboration, you need partners. You want to play in a movie theatre? Well, how many Indigenous movie chains are there? There's none."
This is where the Indigenous Screen Office can step in and help Indigenous media creators.
"The role of the office is mainly one of advocacy, to talk to national institutions, the gatekeepers of the screen industries, to create more opportunities for Indigenous people to tell our own stories on screen," said Wente.
The ISO is also developing protocols of how to tell Indigenous stories through film, which Wente said is based on similar protocols produced by Screen Australia's Indigenous department more than 20 years ago.
"My hopes with the ISO is supporting Indigenous sovereignty through storytelling on screens," said Wente.
Hearing Haida in film was 'magic'
One Indigenous film that is the talk of the Toronto International Film Festival is Edge of the Knife, which is the first feature length film in the Haida language.
Wente went to the premiere, and describes hearing Haida on screen as "magic."
"I had the same feeling when I stood in 2006 on opening night at the Toronto International Film Festival for The Journals of Knud Rasmussen," said Wente.
That film was directed by Zacharias Kanuk, and is shot entirely in Inuktitut.
"To hear that language [in a film], I cried," said Wente.
"I think it's so important to see [films] in these spaces, because these are very popular spaces where so much of our world is understood by other people."
Wente says that there are many Indigenous stories to be shared, and is hopeful for Indigenous cinema in Canada.
"When it comes time to start telling [our stories], they're new, they're fresh for not just [Indigenous people], but also the larger population and an industry that's bereft of original storytelling," said Wente.