A cclaimed film director Alanis Obomsawin is still listening, as both a mentor and a working filmmaker 56 years into a storied career.

The 90-year-old Abenaki artist and documentary filmmaker will be in attendance at the Indigenous Screen Summit’s (ISS) second annual pitch forum during the Banff World Media Festival (BANFF) as an expert commentator.

The June 11 event will see 15 total participants pitch scripted and unscripted projects, and Obomsawin will provide feedback to the five Indigenous filmmakers pitching unscripted or documentary projects.

Obomsawin spoke with Playback Daily in the lead-up to the festival — where she’ll also receive the Career Achievement Award at BANFF’s 2023 Rockies Gala on June 13 — stating that the difference in opportunities for Indigenous filmmakers now compared to when she first began is “unimaginable.”

“I am very excited about the opening up of the industry in every corner of the country. I think that all the institutions in the country have a space and have money for Indigenous disciplines, for Indigenous people to apply for whatever it is they wish to become. And for me, that’s the biggest gift,” she says.

Obomsawin says she still has not forgotten her main rule when it comes to making documentaries: that the story does not belong to her.

“It means you have a lot of respect for people’s stories, for their voice. For me, I always call it sacred,” says Obomsawin.

It’s an approach she wants Indigenous producers presenting their work at the ISS pitch forum and aspiring documentary filmmakers to follow and remember.

She’ll also keep the rule to heart as she works on her 57th film with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).

The Green Horse (working title), coproduced by Obomsawin and Rohan Fernando of the NFB’s Quebec and Atlantic Studio, is a short that recalls “her own childhood dream.” It “recreates the story of the Green Horse in the community of Odanak, so that young kids with special needs can understand the language and importance of dreams,” according to an NFB press release.

She says she hasn’t changed the way she works over the course of her prolific career, and her process always prioritizes having conversations with people, often multiple, and not just “showing up with a camera and crew” and never using anything in a film that a person is not comfortable with.

“I think you have to remember as a filmmaker that if you’re doing a documentary, you are not dictating what the story is. You have to first start listening to another person or another group of people,” she adds.

In addition to her upcoming Career Achievement honour, Obomsawin has been decorated with numerous awards and distinctions, including being appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada — its highest honour — in 2019. She was also given two of Quebec’s highest honours, Grande Officière of the Ordre national du Québec and the prix Albert-Tessier in 2016, and was given the Directors Guild of Canada’s Honourary Life Member Award in 2018.

She will also be the first woman filmmaker to be awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal, an honour given in the U.S. beginning in 1960 to recognize artist achievements in a wide range of fields, joining the ranks of past winners David Lynch, Alice Munro and Stephen Sondheim. The awards ceremony is scheduled for July 23.

Her films include Incident at Restigouche (1984), featuring police raids on a Mi’kmaq reserve in Quebec and the multi-award winning Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), a feature-length documentary about the 1990 Oka Crisis in Quebec. According to NFB, the film was described as a “watershed film in the history of First Peoples cinema” by the first executive director of the Indigenous Screen Office, Jesse Wente.

Obomsawin made three subsequent films on the Oka Crisis: My Name Is Kahentiiosta (1995), Spudwrench – Kahnawake Man (1997) and Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000).

Hi-Ho Mistahey! (2013) and Obomsawin’s 50th film Our People Will Be Healed (2017) explored the challenges Indigenous youth face in accessing quality education and also programs that are promoting learning about their history and culture. Those stories still need to be told, she says, stressing the need for “every nation, their children and their people” to learn “about their own history and their own language.”

“When we were small, if you spoke your language, you got punished for it. And we were told that our language didn’t have any morals and shouldn’t exist, so it was an awful time. And this is over with now and it’s open and people in all aspects of our lives are encouraged to learn the language, are encouraged to know their history,” she says.

Obomsawin is currently putting together a box set of films with the NFB that includes excerpts from past films mixed with bonus content that she hopes teachers and classrooms can benefit from, and anyone interested in learning more about a particular subject.

Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images