Sundance Institute announces inaugural Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive

The nonprofit Sundance Institute has announced a newly created Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive, taking place virtually from July 27-29.

The Intensive provides a space for artists to experiment and receive feedback from the participating advisors and peers. The three-day program features interactive group sessions, advisor presentations, and round table conversations on topics including Indigenising storytelling and creative and strategic tools to shape their films.

The participating filmmakers will also receive a small grant and year-round creative support from the Indigenous Program staff as they work to complete their films.

The advisors for the inaugural Sundance Institute Non-Fiction Intensive include Colleen Thurston (Choctaw), Maya Daisy Hawke, and Darol Olu Kae. The Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive builds on Sundance’s commitment to documentary filmmaking through its DFP Fund and Labs.

“There’s a history of documentary film and Indigenous communities that’s been, to put it lightly, contentious. This tension lies in the non-fiction field’s roots in salvage ethnography, a now widely critiqued practice of early American anthropology’s compulsions of capturing cultures before their assumed extinction. It was at its most formative in Robert J. Flaherty’s silent film Nanook of the North (1922). Despite its distinction as being the first ever feature-length documentary, the film has since been criticized for its subhumanizing portrayals of the Inuit in comparing them to animals and for its plethora of staged sequences inferring Indigenous people were technologically a century behind how they were currently living. The success of Flaherty’s work and others further cemented American Cinema’s image of Indigenous people as living outside of modernity and opened the door for filmmakers utilizing similar extractive and deliberately misrepresentative practices that have continued a century later” said Adam Piron, director, Indigenous Program (Kiowa and Mohawk Tribes).

“In spite of this trajectory, Indigenous filmmakers for over fifty years have actively pushed against this legacy and the results have yielded some of the more exciting developments in recent non-fiction. With all of its built-in questioning of objectivity, subjectivity, and the gaze, non-fiction provided a cinematic space that Indigenous artists have utilized to subvert the very form itself and its historical conventions by leaning into their own expressions of culturally-specific storytelling traditions and logic.”

Sundance Institute has launched its inaugural Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive with the goal of identifying Indigenous artists creating formally bold and personal work and to uplift them with a grant and mentorship on a current edit of their short-form documentary films.

Filmmakers such as Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), Leya Hale (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota/Diné), Alexandra Lazarowich (Cree), Ciara Lacy (Kanaka Maoli), Fox Maxy (Payómkawichum/Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians), Jeffrey Palmer (Kiowa), and Adam and Zack Khalil (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians) are just a few of the artists who have created work emblematic of these latest developments in the doc space; all of whom have also been supported by Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program.

The Sundance Institute Indigenous Program is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Warner Bros. Discovery, Nia Tero Foundation, Indigenous Screen Office, SAGindie, Oneida Indian Nation, New Zealand Film Commission, Jenifer and Jeffrey Westphal, Susan Friedenberg, Susan Shilliday, Indigenous Media Initiatives, Chelsea Winstanley, Exposure Labs, Felix Culpa, Bird Runningwater, Sterlin Harjo, and Sarah Luther.

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The artists selected for the 2022 Sundance Institute Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive are:

Sarah Liese with Coming In

Growing up in a colonised world, Sarah always felt unconfident about the intersectionality of her identity. It was not until her journey to meet other two-spirit people and learn more about the history of the concept that she was able to decolonize more of her mind and strive to decolonise other corrupt systems around her.