Skoden Indigenous Film Festival launches sixth annual edition, April 6 and 7

Four short film programs and Jules Koostachin’s feature WaaPake (Tomorrow) screen at SFU’s Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema

SPONSORED POST BY Skoden Indigenous Film Festival

Jules Koostachin’s WaaPake (Tomorrow) (2023).

This year’s Skoden Indigenous Film Festival (SIFF), which features work from across Turtle Island by Indigenous filmmakers, actors, directors, and creatives, takes place on April 6 and 7 at the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts.

SIFF is a two-day film festival held on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Wauthuth Peoples. It is screened annually at SFU, the alma mater of co-founders Carr Sappier and Grace Mathisen. The festival was founded in 2019, when Carr and Mathisen were in their fourth year of school, and it works to Indigenize SFU and decolonize the film industry in Vancouver and beyond.

SIFF is organized and led by a class of students from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts and the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, and co-taught for the last four years by Carr Sappier and Kathleen Mullen.

Amanda Strong’s Spirit Bear: Honouring Memories, Planting Dreams (2022).

At this year’s festival, attendees will have the opportunity to see four different shorts programs: Retracing Our Roots, Sea to Sky, Planting the Seed, and All My Affections. A fifth program, Stronger Together, presents a screening of Jules Koostachin’s feature film WaaPake (Tomorrow) (2023) on April 6 at 6 pm, accompanied by Toby Mak’s short film March with Arch (2023).

Koostachin follows the marks that residential schools left in her family by letting her loved ones speak their truths in WaaPake (Tomorrow). The documentary film is a powerful plea for facing one’s own traumas, and finding reconciliation in community.

Lindsay McIntyre’s NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ (The South Wind) (2023).

The shorts programs feature works by both returning filmmakers, and artists who are new to the festival. Among the highlights are Amanda Strong’s Spirit Bear: Honouring Memories, Planting Dreams (2022), a lighthearted animation in which Spirit Bear learns of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action; Jay Cardinal Villeneuve’s Buffalo Testicles for the Soul (2023), which sees disgraced comedian Mark Buffalo tailed by a camera crew as he meanders through East Vancouver on the way to his first comeback show; and Lindsay McIntyre’s tender, uncanny NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ (The South Wind) (2023), which provides a thematic, emotional, and temporal compass for the rest of the program.

For a full schedule of films, visit Skoden Indigenous Film Festival.

Post sponsored by Skoden Indigenous Film Festival.

Jay Cardinal Villeneuve’s Buffalo Testicles for the Soul (2023).