March 2011
 Danis Goulet (Métis) is an independent filmmaker who until 2009 served as artistic director of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, where she continues as a lead programmer. Goulet has written and directed three shorts, all of which have screened widely at international film festivals, including Message Sticks Film Festival in Sydney, the Native American Film + Video Festival in New York, and the Cinematheqe in Copenhagen. Her latest film, Wapawekka, reflects her own early life in northern Saskatchewan and her experience of the generation gap in the Cree community. It debuted at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival and was selected for its U.S. premiere as part of the “Indigenous Shorts” program at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
In 2008, under Goulet’s auspices, imagineNATIVE launched the Embargo Collective, a project in which seven international indigenous filmmakers were commissioned to create short films using self-imposed guidelines that challenged their creativity. The Embargo Collective works premiered at imagineNATIVE in 2009, and were selected for screening in the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival and the 2011 Native American Film + Video Festival.
Goulet sits on the board of the Toronto Arts Council as Co-Chair of the Visual and Media Arts Committee. She has worked for the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation and the Canadian media arts distribution company Vtape, and in casting for feature films and television. She got her first professional production experience as a casting assistant on the Saskatchewan television mini-series Big Bear in 1998 (d. Gil Cardinal), but her interest in filmmaking started when she was a teenager and was shooting video with a VHS camcorder. Goulet was born in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, and currently lives in Toronto.
Screened by NMAI
Image credit:
Danis Goulet - courtesy of Vtape
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