The Acimowin Youth Film Program is now available for First Nations communities.
The 2-week afterschool program through the Acimowin Film Festival is looking for youth who want to become filmmakers.
“We’re trying to expand the on-screen sector development, which is essentially establishing more Indigenous filmmakers and specifically within First Nation communities,” said Tristen Greyeyes, Founder and Executive Director of Acimowin Film Festival.
Greyeyes didn’t know she could be a filmmaker until she went to university.
“Indigenous youth are seeing themselves being represented on screen in a positive way that they’re starting to think about those things, and they still don’t have access to those tools,” explained Greyeyes.
The program will provide tools such as camaras, computers, editing software, lights, and mentorship with established filmmakers.
This is the first film programming that they are facilitating, and Greyeyes hopes that it will continue to be offered annually.
“We want to bring in an elder, a local elder, and we’ll come to their community, and the elder could talk about storytelling and just set us off in a really good way, and then we’ll start designing a world,” said Greyeyes.
After the lessons in filmmaking take place, then the students will move on to learn the editing side.
“We would expect it [the film] to be completed by the end of the second week, where we would screen it for the community and we would provide food and drinks for parents, friends, and the youth,” explained Greyeyes. “It would be like a film festival screening, and we would have a Q&A after the screening just for the youth to talk about what they’ve learned.”
The program is expected to run after school and on the weekends.
Greyeyes says they are trying to find interested First Nations communities to host the program. All they need is a month’s notice to book accommodations, flights, and staff.
“Once they have the very basics, they could do it with their phones, they could do it for TikTok, they could do it for whatever they’d like to in the future,” explained Greyeyes.
To learn more about the program or to voice your interest in having the Acimowin Youth Film Festival in your community, contact Tristin Greyeyes via email at tristin@acimowinfilmfestival.com.
To follow along with the Acimowin Film Festival and the Acimowin Youth Film Program at www.acimowinfilmfestival.com and on their Facebook page and Instagram.