It was the summer of 2018 when I approached Dana Claxton, after a keen suggestion from our mutual acquaintance Heather Igloliorte, to edit a book together. I was a huge fan of Dana’s art, so it was with much excitement and anticipation that I embarked on what would end up being a long journey with her.

After more than one roadblock, including a global pandemic, I am delighted to report that our publisher, WLUP, will begin shipping copies to customers in April 2023. You can jump right on over to their site and pre-order a copy right away.

The 437-page collection features 20 contributors from across Turtle Island exploring the aesthetics, politics and ethics of Indigenous media arts from film to installation, artefacts to institutions. There are academic essays, chapters written by artists, interviews with filmmakers and a rousing text from a particularly raucous roundtable held at imagineNATIVE called “Insiders/Outsiders” (the original title of the book, which we changed for practical reasons). Whether you are in academia, the arts, or just plain interested or curious, there is a bounty of wisdom and provocation waiting for you in this timely collection. But don’t take our word for it! —

Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton’s collection of conversations between, for, and about Indigenous media makers poses vital, critical, and generative questions about Indigenous film, film festivals and institutions, residential school histories, and decolonization without providing easy answers. These conversations are at times joyful expressions of the radical possibilities of media arts and at times painful provocations about settler colonial violence and its representational apparatuses. The chapters, written by the most brilliant and creative minds in contemporary Indigenous film, are paradigm-shifting love letters to the land, lived experience, collaboration, and futurity.

— Michelle Raheja, Association Professor, Dept. of English, University of California, Riverside, and author of Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film.

Get your copy pre-ordered (folks in the US click here, folks outside of North America click here), get your library or local bookstore to carry it, help spread the word, and in a short while you’ll be able to dive into this beautiful, imaginative collection of critical thinking, creative doing and community building. Indeed, the making, caring and sharing that grounds this book is the hard work and commitment of all who contributed. We are grateful to everyone who took this journey with us, and who now share the pathways with everyone that reads the storied pages of Indigenous Media Arts in Canada: Making, Caring, Sharing.

When considering the liberal festival experience, agnostic curation sidesteps what I call screen ethics, an approach to media or screen arts that denies the possibility of content being tidily and unproblematically divorced from context, and holds that ethical considerations must include the ways in which films are made and the ways in which films circulate and are embedded/deployed in wider cultures and society (especially by way of curatorial and exhibition practices and platforms).

With this in mind, when we ask what are the ethical concerns around films programmed at film festivals, we are including concerns around on and off-screen representation, reciprocal relationships between makers and subjects and audiences, fair and just policies and practices, as well as equitable curatorial processes and inclusive organization of film screenings.

Screen ethics, which gathers making, choosing, showing, and experiencing under one principled roof, therefore points to a social justice-committed, rather than agnostic, type of curation. The ethical bundling of film production with film curation, circulation and exhibition forces a closer look at a series of relations that move outward from a film’s inception to its reception, from intent to content to context, and which keeps company with calls for a “documentary code of ethics” by demanding festivals and other film institutions develop and make public best practices protocols and ethics policies, thus formalizing and making transparent these complex cascades of relations and their ethical dimensions that continue like associative tributaries from the film text long after picture lock.

Paying attention to screen ethics and demanding our arts institutions do the same can serve as an antidote to agnostic programming, by now a mainstay of the liberal festival architecture and experience. The story of screen ethics—which quite literally gestures to the many screens and frames on and through which a film will contextually travel—is the back story to every documentary’s circulatory trajectory. Screen ethics calls attention to the production and circulation of films, never extricating the product from the processes that allow a film text to exist and move in the world.

Essentially, screen ethics never ignores the (back) story of the film as a web-of-relations (of financing, commissioning, collaboration, curation, etc). What audiences encounter on screen represents a small portion of the larger picture, which involves all the relations and their power dispersions. A screen ethics approach to practicing and analyzing filmmaking, film management and film programming, with its objective to tease out inequity and injustice, is therefore part of the recalibration scaffolding that supports the critical curatorial framework I think we need.

Because an insistence on the implementation of screen ethics implicates powerful industry players and implies a pulling back of the proverbial curtain to reveal the not-for-public-consumption inner workings of arts institutions (and the non-reciprocal, uneven and exploitative relations therein), it remains a radical provocation which has yet to take hold in an era where corporately-funded film festivals are misguidedly considered alternative media/film platforms to big media and Hollywood’s extended exhibition circuitry. It is my optimistic hope that film makers, programmers, managers, financiers, audiences, fans and stakeholder communities will demand and initiate a framework of screen ethics in practice and policy.

Pictured above: Coca-Cola was the Environmental Film sponsor at Hot Docs in 2013, an instance I point to when highlighting a lack of practiced screen ethics at festivals.

In the advert, entitled “The Walmart Box” and directed by Hollywood filmmaker Nancy Meyers, Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer struggles in his home studio to find the right music to accompany film images on his multiple work screens. Clearly the soundtrack maestro, who has scored almost as many motion pictures as Walmart has destroyed communities, is having a creative block.

Outside the master’s room a bevy of musicians wait in the hall, instruments in hand, as they listen to his stilted piano keys never quite find the tune. As the hours pass a Walmart package is set on a chair in the studio, its bright blue tone striking a chord out of key with the rest of the dark browns and reds in the dimly lit room packed with instruments and furniture.

Then one of the musicians announces – “I’m goin’ in,” and puts down his drum. He quietly enters the room, sees and picks up the Walmart box, and begins tapping out an upbeat tempo. Zimmer hears, turns to smile, and in an act of inspired creative collaboration, finds the accompanying tune on the piano. The rest of the band rush in with instruments in hand, all smiling, and as they join Zimmer in the background, and text on screen read: “Inspiration. Where does it come from? Everywhere.”

This short video advertisement for one of the world’s worst human rights, labour and environmental abusing corporations, personifies a values disonnance so often seen in film and media, the bulk of which is quickly being devoured by large corporations with deep pockets.

Leaving aside Zimmer’s own reasons for choosing to do an advert for Walmart (the composer has an estimated net worth of $200 million USD), “The Walmart Box” absurdly juxtaposes resplendent creativity with a cardboard box likely containing cheap Chinese-manufactured bargain-basement products sold at Walmart. That Walmart wishes to associate with high-class, respected and talented creatives is part of a recent campaign by the behemoth to further entrench its base clientele, the middle class, and is meant to convey values the Arkansas-based company is far from embodying – the freedom of the creative spirit in this case. Walmart after all values bullying, price-gouging, torturous labour conditions, poisoned environments, monopoly capitalism and above all high profits at low (labour, human rights, environmental, community) costs. Hardly the stuff of collaborative creativity and transformative beauty.

I’ve done two of these so far: a talk just over a week ago at Concordia University (in Montreal) with around 500 Fine Arts students on the topic of colonialism and cinema in Canada. We watched Tasha Hubbard’s brilliant decolonizing documentary BIRTH OF A FAMILY (which I’ve written about for POV Magazine here), then discussed the concepts of nation, sovereignty, settler colonialism, and the role of documentary in supporting or challenging narrow definitions of nationhood as well as colonization.

And yesterday I met with a smaller group at Ryerson University (Toronto) to talk about the recently donated Hot Docs archives at Ryerson (the image above show the poster for the event on a pillar at Ryerson). The talk was held in the brand new Catalyst lab space – a new hub for research and events engaging with the creative industries. My talk, called “Parts of Story: Researching and Writing About Incomplete Archives,” centered on critically assessing institutional discourse through archives, and figuring out how to put together all the parts of a story of an institution—both official and otherwise—like the Hot Docs film festival. The group who showed up at excellent questions and comments, and the discussion confirms my suspicion that we need a Critical Festival Studies research group that reaches across international borders, institutions and fields.

Next up: a talk about my research as Curator-In-Residency at Concordia – “Settler Frames.” That one will be at York University (Toronto) on Monday, then I’m off to Thunder Bay to collaborate with the amazing RiVAL organizers. Below is the whole list of Fall talks. Now I’m off to the best festival in Canada: imagineNATIVE begins today!!!

Sept 28 – Nationhood, Settler Colonialism and Cinema in Canada (Concordia University, Montreal)

Oct 16 – Parts of Story: Researching and Writing About Incomplete Archives (Ryerson University, Toronto)
Oct 23 – Settler Cinema, Ethics and Programming (York University, Toronto)
Oct 24 – Settler Frames: The Formation of Three Settler Identities in Cinema (Lakehead University, Thunder Bay)
Oct 26 – Documentary Futurism: Introducing the Program (Lakehead University, Thunder Bay)
Nov 7 – Settler Frames: Agitating the Archives (Concordia University, Montreal)
Nov 20 – Screen Ethics and Curatorial Politics (Concordia University, Montreal)

Documentary Futurism takes inspiration from Afro-futurism, Indigenous futurism, speculative fiction and non-fiction, and the 15 films inaugurate a new genre which blends documentary tropes with the speculative arts. The Documentary Futurism programme offers a wide range of formal approaches and topics, from mesmerizing site-specific performances to imaginative aesthetic interfaces, from post genital sexuality to decolonization, and each filmmaking team brings an innovative and distinctive approach to documenting that which has yet to occur.

The films have all been finished and they are beautiful, strange, delectable, defiant, perverse, provocative and fantastic. They merge the real with the imagined, the past and present with the future, and together they make for a stunning program of art and politics.

For those in Montreal, see you at the launch. Otherwise, check out the Documentary Futurism site to book the programme or find a screening near you today.

*Image from THE CEREMONY

This short animation from The Atlantic highlights some of Professor Paul Bloom’s thoughts on why empathy—at least a kind of status quo mainstream empathy—isn’t really a good thing at all. The short should really be called “Against warm glow altruism,” as Bloom is focused on building off of Peter Singer’s concept of effective altruism and this isn’t really an argument against empathy per se. The animation is a little rudimentary, but it still serves as a provocation to the burgeoning industry of liberal documentary and its attendant army of NGOs, feel-good capitalists and “impact” specialists.

After a few weeks of the course and after several discussions around programming ethics, responsibilities, practices, and outcomes, we decided to compile a list of questions that someone curating or programming film might want to, or ought to, ask themselves. Partially inspired by the Of the North festival programming scandal, and with a focused interest in the politics of cultural selection, we agreed on the questions below. Some of these may seem painfully obvious, but then again it often seems painfully obvious that certain works shouldn’t be programmed in certain contexts. Other questions may not be so obvious, and considered together our goal was to produce a document that generated critical and reflexive thought on the act of curating and programming.

We live in an age of hyper-curation yet so little attention and discussion is dedicated to the work of curating and the politics of programming. Hopefully this list helps in one small way to address that dearth. And of course, I’d love to hear suggestions for questions to add to the list…

TWENTY KEY CURATORIAL QUESTIONS

1. Who is the intended audience and what is their relationship to the subject?
2. Why should an audience watch this?
3. How nuanced/complex/obvious is this program (both descriptively and normatively)?
4. What is the theme or themes of the program?
5. How would we present this for/in a different context and why?
6. What new meaning(s) is/are created from the pairing/ordering/selection in this program?
7. What is left out that we should be considering (and why was it rejected)?
8. What is the intended impact of this program?
9. What experience is created, or, what experiential opportunities are initiated with this program?
10. What makes this program novel or unique?
11. Who is funding this program (institutional, sponsorship and the films themselves)?
12. Where is this taking place/in which context and how does that effect the screening of this program?
13. What else is going on in the world/what are the wider echos this program is in conversation with?
14. Who is being represented by whom in which manner?
15. How has this film or the films in this program circulated prior to selection?
16. What is a possible unintended or undesired impact of this program?
17. What is the value of this program?
18. Who is speaking, in which order and manner at this program event and why?
19. Whose agenda does this program serve?
20. Does this program reflect the values of the programmer and the institution or organization?

One of the common criticisms of advocacy films like Bully that I’ve heard and share is that the filmmakers narrowly focus on victims without ever exploring those who perpetrate. These films help along the equivocal knee-jerk reaction to oppression when we have a two-dimensional villain to point to: kids today! But why do kids bully and what are their lives like?

Answering, or at least interrogating, these questions would move us in a direction to better understand the complexities of bullying and would likely elicit a more nuanced, thoughtful reaction than the usual moralizing finger-pointing that inevitably leads to ill-suited and ineffective measures around addressing various problems from their peripheries, not the core.

Few and far between are the films that bravely explore the “other sides” of oppressive equations – digging deep into wounds, and exceptionally, into those who wound.

Such are the films of Joshua Oppenheimer, whose The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence upset documentary conventions by taking us alongside (but not necessarily on side) perpetrators of atrocious acts of torture and murder. Nick Fraser was very public about his dislike of The Act of Killing, and pronounced the culture supporting it as somehow complicit, writing that in the West, we love impunity (the perpetrators in Oppenheimer’s films are depicted as living free lives, indeed some even enjoying power and privilege, despite their crimes).

But I disagree with this assertion. We do not all love impunity. Many of “us” love to see wrongs righted and justice served. How many among the powerless relish representations of the powerful getting away with their rapacious and horrendous acts without repercussions?

There is something else that we, as audiences, might love. I have written elsewhere that one aspect of a culture of liberalism found here in this part of the world (North America) is immunity. Audiences are encouraged through mainstream commercial media storytelling and image-producing to not feel implicated in oppressive acts and structures. It is easier to finger-point and go to sleep after the movie knowing that we have nothing to do with x crime or y systemic dysfunction or z atrocity.

Thus the standard, with noted exceptions, is on cinematic representations of victims where the supporting role of the perpetrator is a two-dimensional, quick register of instrumental abject dysfunction/degradation. This isn’t to say we need less documentaries privileging the perspectives and experiences of victims, I just think we need more films doing something different.

With all this in mind, Beata Bubenec’s documentary God’s Will is a welcome departure from the norm. Bubenec, a disciple of the documentary school of Marina Razbezhkina, deeply immerses herself in the world of Russian Orthodox fanatics in Moscow, whose hate-fuelled ideology finds a popular target in that country’s LGBTQ community. It is a difficult film to watch, as the protagonist Enteo spews absurd homophobic rhetoric and queer folks are attacked and beaten on the streets (Bubenec’s camera doesn’t capture a lot of the impact of such violence on the victims, but the powerful Olya’s Love serves as a fitting companion film to God’s Will – a film that compassionately features the perspective of the embattled and brave LGBTQ activists who fight the fascists).

God’s Will ultimately charts a fringe fascist group’s rise to the centre of a virulently homophobic “new normal” in Russia, deftly timed with that country’s draconian legislation against so-called “gay propaganda.”

Seeing these young folks in their everyday, where they aren’t the bogeyman hiding in shadows, then alternating into hateful, violent oppressive activists, is a disturbing, disgusting and disquieting story to encounter. But it’s one that brings us closer to understanding the people behind oppression as well as the culture and society in which they are able to gain legitimacy and power.

Watch this must-see documentary here, and read an interview with the film’s director here.

Anna, our fearless Network Coordinator (she works with all the CP locals, or chapters, worldwide) came up with the brilliant turn-of-phase above, Streaming Truth to Power (a riff on our tag-line mandate: “screening truth to power”). Marie-Noelle has been multi-tasking design and translation to such an effect that I’m sure I saw custom-designed (and bilingual) smoke coming out of her ears today at the office. Alan is our new committed and brave Intern who’s been plugging away on the tech-end of things – getting all the video files compressed and VOD pages built. Adri has been skilfully engaging in the copious ping-pong match of emailing with filmmakers and distributors for contracts, files, information, etc – all the necessary nuts and bolts required to properly host an artist’s film on our VOD service. And of course Svetla, our trusted Exec Director, has been stewarding the ship, not only quality-checking the whole way, but using her forensic skills to hone all matter of wordsmithing – from contract lingo to tweets to promo cards to Press Releases.

And today we launched vod.cinemapolitica.org.

With all the usual trials and tribulations inherent to a small feisty non-profit dizzylingly circling our station, we have all come out bleary-eyed and frazzdazzled – amazed to see the VOD pages up, people renting the films, and the system working! Working!

It all seemed so destined to derail, defuse, de-launch.

A CBC radio interview (an article was also published here) about to go live yesterday at precisely 5:20 pm had us all scrambling like ants to hoist the glorious thing in the air by showtime, and at the magic hour, just when Alan was ready to make all the pages go live – a very (very!) rare Vimeo (the service that hosts all our VOD videos) shutdown of service cursed our warred and harried souls!

Millions of clients were of course impacted, but we were about to go live, curses! The radio interview passed, Vimeo whirred back up and just when we were naively ready to rejoice with reckless optimism of launchness, presto! The CP site became its prickly craggy version of its usual awesomely friendly self just to spite us. Confounding curses!

But yesterday was our soft launch. Today was the big day.

I suppose when you climb in an elevator and the other folks ascending floors with you exclaim in repulsion that there is poop in the lift, that it might be wise to take that as a sign. And not of the good variety.

With that morning experience setting a tone, today—our “official launch day”—was (we thought) being stewarded by an at-the-ready squad of determined debutantes, when a probably less rare, but still infrequent shutdown of internet access occurred across Quebec and Ontario.

With all of us staring at screens that suddenly became dead without internet (more than once, a sapient comment was made reflecting on this rather cruel and bizarre condition). We were so ready but at the mercy of yet another structuring entity. More shit in the lift!

Alas, this isn’t about any real struggle for life-and-death, status, rights, or other real problems so beautifully documented in the films we circulate.

It was, what in theatre, might be called a “French farce” – and I hope we all played our roles brazenly Brechtian and shamelessly Shakespearean.

Because, at the end of the two launch days, the boat is afloat and destined for distant shores that only the globe-circling internet could facilitate with such rapidity and fake proximity.

So there you have it – #CPVOD, with 24 awesomely audacious and astounding political films has launched. Check it out at vod.cinemapolitica.org – just be careful not to hit the wrong key…

I love this short Argentine animation film Padre, and I think you will too. If the film piques your interest into animation production, then check out the wonderful making-of short the filmmakers have so generously provided here.