Sundance Institute Launches Indigenous Non-Fiction Program (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comAddie Morfoot ContributorFour documentary filmmakers were invited to participate in the Sundance Institute’s newly created Indigenous non-fiction intensive program that concludes July 29.The three-day program was created to identify Indigenous artists creating formally bold and personal work and to uplift them with a small grant and mentorship on a current edit of their short-form documentary films.The four filmmakers selected to partake in the new initiative are: Sarah Liese (“Coming In”), Sean Connelly (“A Justice Advancing Architecture Tour”), Olivia Camfield and Woodrow Hunt (“If You Look Under There You’ll Find It”).
The advisors for the inaugural program include Emmy award-winning filmmaker Colleen Thurston (“Osiyo, Voices of the Cherokee People”), filmmaker-editor Maya Daisy Hawke (“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”), and filmmaker Darol Olu Kae (“I Ran From It and Was Still in It”).
Each participant will receive year-round creative support from Sundance’s Indigenous program staffers as they work to complete their films.Indigenous program director Adam Piron says that the new initiative builds on the Sundance Institute’s commitment to documentary filmmaking through its documentary film program and labs.“There’s a history of documentary film and Indigenous communities that’s been, to put it lightly, contentious,” says Piron. “This tension lies in the non-fiction field’s roots in salvage ethnography, a now widely critiqued practice of early American anthropology’s compulsions of capturing cultures before their assumed extinction.”He notes that Robert J.
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