TORONTO — Writer-director Michelle Latimer and actors Lisa Cromarty and Michael Greyeyes are among several Canadians with projects in the upcoming Sundance Film Festival.
Latimer’s documentary “Inconvenient Indian,” which won two awards at September’s Toronto International Film Festival, will screen in Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition.
“Inconvenient Indian” is based on Thomas King’s 2012 non-fiction book and takes viewers on “a critical journey through the colonial narratives of North America.”
When the National Film Board of Canada title won the $10,000 Amplify Voices Award at TIFF, the Toronto-based Latimer — who is of Algonquin, Metis, and French heritage — and the film’s other producers dispersed the money between five Indigenous artists.
Among them was Cromarty, an Anishinaabe and Oji-Cree performer from Northern Ontario who is also in the Sundance lineup with a role in American writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s “Wild Indian.”
Greyeyes, a Toronto-based Plains Cree performer, stars in the story of two Anishinaabe men coming to terms with a murder they covered up as kids. The star-studded film will make its world premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category.
Other Canadians in the lineup include Kelly Fyffe-Marshall of Brampton, Ont., with her short film “Black Bodies,” which was inspired by her own experience facing racism in California. The film won the Shawn Mendes Foundation Changemaker Award at TIFF for tackling issues of social change.
The revenge thriller “Violation,” written, directed and produced by Toronto-based Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, will play in Sundance’s Midnight section after debuting at TIFF.
Montreal-based artist Alisi Telengut, who is of Mongolian heritage, will screen her animated short “The Fourfold.” She used hand-painted imagery mixed with various materials to explore “the Indigenous worldview and wisdom” against the backdrop of climate change.
Montreal writer-director Annie St-Pierre is in the lineup with her short film “Like the Ones I Used to Know” (“Les grandes claques”), about a man who’s anxious about picking up his children from his former in-laws’ home on Christmas Eve, 1983.
The NFB will also be represented at Sundance with the first instalment of the augmented-reality doc “Fortune,” about money and wealth. Brett Gaylor wrote the debut episode.
And Philippe Lacote’s feature “Night of the Kings” is a France/Ivory Coast/Canada/Senegal co-production about a young man at Ivory Coast’s infamous MACA prison.
The festival, which will be largely virtual due to the pandemic, will kick off Jan. 28.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 16, 2020.
Victoria Ahearn, The Canadian Press