Canadian feature films Hey, Viktor! (pictured) and Tautuktavuk (What We See) are among the winning projects at the 2023 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.

The Indigenous film festival’s annual awards were presented on Saturday (Oct. 21) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto to mark the end of the in-person portion of the festival, which will continue online until Oct. 29. A total of $61,000 worth of cash prizes were handed out to winning titles.

Hey, Viktor! (North Country Cinema), directed and co-written by Cody Lightning, won the Dramatic Feature Award, which comes with a $7,500 cash prize. Lightning stars in a mockumentary-style feature, also written by Samuel Miller, as a grown-up child actor who tries to resurrect his career by making a sequel to an ’80s film he appeared in that went viral online.

Tautuktavuk (What We See) (Kingulliit Productions), co-directed by Carol Kunnuk and Lucy Tulugarjuk, won the $2,500 Sun Jury award. The film is based on true events and follows two sisters who try to cope with staying distanced during the COVID-19 pandemic.  This year’s Sun Jury members are filmmakers David Hernández Palmar and Liisa Holmberg, and Canada Council for the Arts program officer Noël Habel.

Jennifer Podemski (Little Bird) was also honoured at the ceremony with the August Schellenberg Award of Excellence, which is presented in partnership with ACTRA National and recognizes an Indigenous actor’s career and impact. It also comes with a cash prize of $2,500.

Canadian short Grape Soda in the Parking Lot, directed by Megan Kyak-Monteith and Taqralik Partridge, won two awards, picking up the honours for documentary short and animated short with a combined cash prize of $5,000. The eight-minute title is part of CBC Gem’s How to Lose Everything series and touches on the impact of losing language.

Meanwhile, Lindsay McIntyre’s Nigiqtuq (The South Wind) picked up the $7,500 Live Action Short Award, which was named as an Oscar-qualifying award in 2019. The 17-minute short is based on a true story, and follows an Inuit mother and daughter who face pressures to assimilate when they move south in the 1930s.

Image courtesy of North Country Cinema