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Actress Tantoo Cardinal
has received the 2007 Sun Hill Award for Excellence in Native
American Filmmaking. The award, presented biennially by the Sun
Hill Foundation and the Harvard Film Archive, honors significant
contributions to the legacy of Native American film. Previous
honorees have been directors Chris Eyre and Zacharias Kunuk.
1/12/08
Filmmaker Elizabeth
Day (Ojibwe) is one of 4 artists selected for a 2008 Bush
Fellowship in Media Arts. The Bush Foundation awards substantial
grants each year to up to 15 artists in various disciplines to
realize new projects. Day is an emerging filmmaker, born on the
Leech Lake Reservation and raised in Minneapolis, who is interested
in the connection between urban and reservation life. Her earlier
projects, including her most recent short Sunshine,
have received support from IFP Minnesota. Her project Beaded
Road (working title), with writer Winona
Wilms (Ojibwe), was selected for the 2006 Tribeca All Access
program.
8/12/08
Writer and actor Darrell Dennis (Shushwap)
has been selected for the Sundance Institute's 2008 Screenwriters
Lab for work on his screenplay for Tales of an Urban Indian,
a dark and irreverent comedy about the trials and tribulations
of a young First Nations man moving from the reserve to the city.
Dennis was nominated for the prestigious Dora Award for writing
for his one-man show with the same title, on which his screenplay
is based. A 5-day workshop at Sundance Resort in Utah, the Lab
is designed to provide independent filmmakers the opportunity
to work intensively on their scripts with the support of established
writers.
2/22/08
José
Alfredo Jiménez Pérez (Tzotzil) has been
selected by Renew Media for an award for his documentary project
Acteal, 10 anos de impunidad y quantos mas…
(working title) about the 1997 massacre of indigenous villagers
in Acteal, Chiapas in Mexico. Renew Media annually awards fellowships
through a nomination and selection process to approximately 14
film and video artists and 6 new media artists in the United States
and six media artists in Mexico.
1/06/08
Director Billy Luther
(Navajo/Hopi/Laguna Pueblo) has become the first Native American
filmmaker to be awarded support from Creative Capital, a premiere
national organization founded in 1999 to support individual US
artists in film/video and the visual arts. Luther's winning documentary
project, Grab (working title), focuses on Grab Day, an
annual celebration traditional to Laguna Pueblo, and follows family
members as they participate. Luther has previously been the recipient
of the Roy W. Dean Fellowship and a selected participant in the
Tribeca Film Institute's All Access program. His feature documentary,
Miss Navajo, premiered
at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and was aired on PBS' Independent
Lens series.
Creative Capital's winning projects receive initial awards of
$10,000. As the projects develop, the organization may offer as
much as $50,000 each through the tenure of the multi-year grant.
The winners also participate in a distinctive Artist Services
Program that provides skill-building assistance in areas such
as fundraising, networking, marketing, and strategic planning,
with the goal of advancing both their projects and their careers.
In 2008 forty-one media and visual artists' projects were selected
from 2,535 applications.
1/26/08
In 2008 Andrew Okpeaha
MacLean (Inupiat) was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship, a program established in 2006 to select extraordinary US artists in all disciplines. This fellowship program has been initially funded by a consortium of foundations--Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential, and Rasmuson. Candidates for the fellowship are proposed by nominators selected for their expertise in the arts, and the winners are chosen by a peer-review panel. The purpose of the $50,000 award is to provide the selected artists with enough income to be able to freely focus for a substantial period of time on their creative projects.
2/29/09
Media artists and writers Kade Twist (Cherokee) and Nathan
Young have received a 2008 Tribeca All Access Creative Promise
Honorable Mention for Screenwriting for their screenplay, Heavy
Metal Indians (working title), in which a rebellious Native
American teenager struggles with misfits, methamphetamines, and
an unexpected act of violence that changes him forever. Twist
was a participant in the recent Reel Native workshop utilizing
cell phones for digital media production organized in Phoenix
by the WGBH mini-series We Shall Remain. He is one of the
artists in the 2008 group show "Remix: New Modernities in
a Post-Indian World," a joint exhibition of The Heard Museum
and the National Museum of the American Indian. Four Creative
Promise Awards and three Honorable Mentions were selected by a
distinguished jury from the 31 film projects chosen to participate
in the 2008 Tribeca All Access program.
8/12/08
Ce qu'il faut pour vivre/The Necessities of Life (d. Benoît Pilon), a bittersweet film about an Inuit hunter trying to survive in a Quebec sanatorium, has eight nominations for the 2009 Genie Awards in Canada. Nominated for Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role is Natar Ungalaaq (Inuit) who plays the Inuit hunter Tiivii, taken from his home in northern Quebec when struck by tuberculosis, which was epidemic in the Arctic in the early 1950's. He is on-screen throughout the film. In 2000 Ungalaak made an indelible impression in his first lead role, portraying the courageous and clever hunter who barely escapes murder by fleeing, naked, across the frozen tundra, and finally restores his community to harmony, in the award-winning feature Atanarjuat/The Fast Runner, directed by Zacharias Kunuk (Inuit).
3/18/09
Media artists and writers Nathan
Young (Pawnee/Delaware/Kiowa) and Kade Twist have received
a 2008 Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Honorable Mention for
Screenwriting for their screenplay, Heavy Metal Indians
(working title), in which a rebellious Native American teenager
struggles with misfits, methamphetamines, and an unexpected act
of violence that changes him forever. Four Creative Promise Awards
and three Honorable Mentions were selected by a distinguished
jury from the 31 projects chosen to participate in the 2008 Tribeca
All Access program. Young is the co-director of the Professional
Development Center at the Fort Gibson Public Schools in Oklahoma,
where he leads students in the creation of indigneous language
animations. In 2005 he was awarded Renew Media's [now the Tribeca
Film Institute's) Media Arts Fellowship.
8/12/08
** indicates that a short description of the
film can be found in the PDFs of titles screened at the 1995,
1997 and 2000 Native American Film and Video Festivals. To open
the PDF sorted by title, enter
here.
Image credit:
Carlos Efraín Pérez being interviewed by Marcelino
Pinto, 2000 Native American Film and Video Festival - Photograph
by Amalia Cordova, NMAI
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