Since its founding in 2000, Winnipeg-headquartered Eagle Vision has operated under the motto of “creating content that creates change” – a guiding principle that is evident throughout the prodco’s output over the past 25 years.

As one of the foremost Indigenous-owned production companies in Canada, Eagle Vision’s portfolio ranges from Oscar-winning feature films to practically every genre of television – from scripted drama to hard-hitting documentaries, and from culturally conscious kids content to true crime programming with a social impact slant. And, as befits a production company in 2025, it has expanded its buyer base beyond the worlds of film and TV and is moving further into digital and podcast content.

Regardless of the platform for the programming or the genre, according to founding partner and president Lisa Meeches (pictured) – an Anishinaabe filmmaker from Long Plain First Nation, Sandy Bay First Nation and Ebb and Flow First Nation – the imperative to craft change-making content can be traced back to teachings from her grandfather, Don Daniels. An Elder and spiritual leader from Long Plain First Nation, he had often told his granddaughter that storytelling is a form of medicine.

“He recognized the potential of this medium for healing and saw it as a tool,” Meeches tells Playback. “He said, ‘Your camera is your sacred bundle.’ The contents of a bundle include a pipe, a drum, a rattle… If you notice, a tripod looks like tipi poles.”

Meeches has taken her grandfather’s words to heart throughout her career. Studying broadcasting in North Dakota, she began her television work in earnest with a stint at Winnipeg’s Native Media Network in 1986, and moved into a news reporting role for Craig Broadcasting in Manitoba and Alberta. There, she put together a liaison team connecting the newsrooms with surrounding First Nation communities.

Carving a path as an Indigenous TV reporter, and building an audience while doing so, led to an opportunity to host her own weekly series. That series, The Sharing Circle, would go on to be one of the longest running Indigenous television series in Canada to date, airing on APTN and CityTV from 1991 to 2006.

Creating her own production outfit, Meeches Video Productions, in that timeframe, she went on to team with another Winnipeg television fixture, MidCanada Production Services president and founder Wayne Sheldon, to form Eagle Vision. (Sheldon was a partner in the company until 2012.)

The company would take on production duties for The Sharing Circle in its run through the 2000s, but its first original series was 2002’s Tipi Tales (pictured left), a three-season preschool-focused series on Corus’ Treehouse TV and APTN. Veteran producer Lesley Oswald was also brought onto the series as a director and co-creator by Meeches.

Tipi Tales also ushered in another significant development for the company in the form of two people who would shape its future. At that time non-Indigenous Manitoba producer Kyle Irving joined the company as a production assistant. By the series’ end in 2007, he was offered the head of production role by Meeches, and today he is also a co-owner and partner.

Meanwhile, Manitoba-based multihyphenate Rebecca Gibson also worked on the series as a lead puppeteer and voice actor, and, after the first season, a writer. After Tipi Tales, she continued to work with Eagle Vision on projects and since 2020, she has been a co-owner and partner.

“[Tipi Tales] became a bit of an effort to decolonize the industry,” says Irving now. “Fighting with funders over the approval of gifting tobacco in a budget was something they’d never had to deal with before.”

Also critical to the company’s story is Taken, which tells the stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across Canada. According to Irving, “nobody” wanted the show when they pitched it.

It wasn’t until the body of Indigenous teenager Tina Fontaine was discovered in August 2014 that “the world started paying attention.” The series ran for four seasons on APTN and CBC before taking a hiatus in 2019. It will return to APTN for a fifth season in 2026. Eagle Vision also produces a podcast based on the series.

Beyond the company’s successes both at home and internationally with its television projects, Eagle Vision has also made substantial inroads in the feature film space. Commercially, the company achieved a new level of visibility internationally as coproducer of the 2005 biopic Capote with Infinity Features, United Artists and Sony Pictures.

According to Irving, the film’s success, driven by a sterling performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman as iconic American author Truman Capote, “really elevated the company in the eyes of the world as a legitimate player.” The film garnered a best picture nomination and a best actor win for Hoffman at that year’s Academy Awards.

Since then Eagle Vision has worked on a number of other international coproductions such as 2007’s Blue State, starring Anna Paquin and coproduced with her shingle, Paquin Films; and 2014’s Reasonable Doubt, starring Samuel L. Jackson.

The company is also currently working on three interprovincial productions following the success of its 2024 copro Deaner ’89 from actor-writer-producer Paul Spence and his Quebec-based PSA Productions.

Eagle Vision struck a chord with the 2012 feature doc We Were Children, directed by Tim Wolochatiuk and coproduced with what was then Entertainment One (now Lionsgate Canada) and the National Film Board of Canada. Delving into the experiences of children suffering from abuse in the residential school system, according to the company, it is used by more than 27,000 teachers across Canada in their curriculums.

A sweet spot in terms of Eagle Vision’s forays into feature production for the last decade has involved providing a financing model for films with budgets between $1 to $1.5 million. This began in 2016 with Tyson Caron’s Lovesick and continued with Deco Dawson’s Diaspora (2022) and Madison Thomas’ Finality of Dusk (2023).

Eagle Vision has brought in more than $280 million in production over 25 years – with $220 million of that happening over the last 10 years, according to Irving. Of course, even if you’ve been fortunate to keep your prodco active for 25 years, given the ever-shifting nature of how audiences consume content, it behooves producers to explore new opportunities as they emerge. Gibson helped steer the company towards the burgeoning world of short-form social video with the 5 x 10-minute factual series, Reclaim(ed) for Snapchat – the platform’s first Canadian original series.

“When Rebecca Gibson tells you to pivot, that’s exactly what you do,” says Meeches. “She is really a great mind reader when it comes to Canadian content and Canadian development for that matter.”

It was also Gibson’s idea for the company to expand into interactive media alongside Winnipeg’s Flightyfelon Games via a video game adapted from Indigenous Ingenuity, a children’s book from Diedre Havrelock and Edward Kay. The company had previously optioned the book in February 2024 to develop it as a factual 10 x 30-minute series.

The prodco has already diversified well beyond content creation, including the launch of sustainability- minded service company Talon Production Services in 2018. As well, Eagle Vision plans to expand its Migizi Distribution division, founded in August 2020, and “open it up to the world,” according to Irving. Previously, the distribution imprint had only been used for Eagle Vision’s own content, but Irving says the company has spent the last several years building up the division, and is now able to access the CMF Distributor Program. There are also discussions of an Eagle Vision-curated FAST channel.

The company announced further expansion plans at the 2025 Banff World Media Festival, launching a new content brand Live From Winnipeg and the business affairs service Good Faith.

Meeches attributes part of Eagle Vision’s longevity to its mentorship of others in the Canadian screen industry. Gibson cites Darcy Waites, Jessica Landry and Katy Haynes, who now works with Eagle Vision as a producer, as just a few of the company’s mentees over the years. Newly promoted head of content Dinae Robinson is another.

Robinson’s relationship with Gibson stretches back more than a decade, when the latter was her acting instructor in Winnipeg. She was then brought on as a transcriber and eventually a writer on season three of Taken, and credits the company with the work she’s done in the industry since. “[Eagle Vision is] very keen on ensuring that the correct people are in place [to tell] the stories,” says Robinson.

Meeches also had integral roles in programs such as the National Screen Institute’s CBC New Indigenous Voices program, which she co-created with Vanessa Loewen in 2004. Eagle Vision itself sponsors the Indigenous filmmaker’s fellowship with the Whistler Film Festival, among other initiatives.

“The success of their productions is surpassed only by their ongoing commitment to foster emerging Indigenous and Canadian talent along the way,” says Canada Media Fund CEO Valerie Creighton. She adds that the Eagle Vision team’s “dedication to community collaboration, narrative sovereignty and talent development, combined with their proven ability to deliver high-quality, impactful content, makes them an invaluable and trusted partner in the Canadian media landscape.”

Meeches also points to projects such as CBC, Netflix and APTN’s North of North (Red Marrow Media, Northwood Entertainment); Crave and APTN lumi’s limited series Little Bird (Rezolution Pictures, Original Pictures); and the hybrid project Bones of Crows (Ayasew Ooskana Pictures, Marie Clements Media, Screen Siren Pictures, Grana Productions) as notable steps in the right direction.

“This is a group of storytellers that has just started to get their legs, and the future [for them] is bright and exciting,” offers Irving. “It’s nice to not feel like we’re the only ones or one of a handful doing it. And for a very long time, it felt that way.”

The company principals say part of its focus going forward will be on Manitoba-shot projects. Eagle Vision’s upcoming slate includes development on an international feature film, an international unscripted series and an animated kids’ series that will be the company’s first venture into the medium.

And as for what that report card for Indigenous representation would be for the industry in 2025, she offers a “D+ [or] D-, because we all [as Canadians] have more to do in moving reconciliation forward. And we have got to start with our own storytelling industry.”

With files from Barry Walsh

Images courtesy of Eagle Vision; pictured (L-R) (Top left) Rebecca Gibson, Herbie Barnes, Jan Skene, Ryan Rajendra Black, (Bottom left), Gibson, Kyle Irving and Lisa Meeches

A version of this story originally appeared in Playback‘s Spring 2025 issue