A rise in Indigenous storytelling at the Vancouver International Film Festival
The Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) has been a big promoter of diversity and inclusion, as they showcase stories from a range of voices from around the country and the world. In this year’s lineup, they have a wide array of Indigenous films being shown. Some of them will also be later aired on the CBC. However, this wasn’t always the case.
According to VIFF’s 2005 lineup found on Letterboxd, there was an absence of Canadian Indigenous films shown in the festival. In contrast, the 2024 lineup has six films and at least six different shorts, out of the 150 feature films and 81 shorts being shown.
Neil Diamond and Joanne Robertson are co-directors of ‘So Surreal’, a film about how the European surrealist art movement took inspiration from stolen Indigenous artifacts. The film is being showcased at VIFF, as well as CBC Gem.
Diamond is a Cree man from the Waskaganish First Nation in Quebec. He is also a co-founder of ‘The Nation’, a magazine for the Cree community in northern Quebec and Ontario. Robertson is a settler who grew up in Vancouver, B.C., and has worked with ‘Rezolution Pictures’, an Indigenous led production company, for the last 25 years.
Robertson thinks that, over the years, there’s been a change in the type of stories the public seeks.
“I think that there’s a shift happening in terms of storytelling and in terms of space for these stories that in history that we haven’t learned.” – Joanne Robertson, co-director of So Surreal
Diamond says that he’s seen a large movement in the desire for Indigenous stories. He explains that it’s not just in film, “It’s in literature, you know, there’s a lot of novels coming out by Indigenous writers, not just in Canada, in the U.S. too.”
While excited for the attention their documentary is getting, both think that if ‘So Surreal’ was pitched back in the nineties, it wouldn’t have gotten the same kind of notice it’s getting today. “It’s really hard to imagine, but the things that we were working on right then, like with APTN [Aboriginal Peoples Television Network], would not have been seen necessarily on CBC,” explained Robertson.
Diamond says that, when it comes to his own way of storytelling, he wants to entertain people as much as educate them, “because I think Canadians still don’t really know too much about Indigenous history. It is starting to be known.” Diamond hopes that audiences will do their research and ask more questions, as, “it’s not just native history, it’s also settler history.”
“I think it’s really important because Indigenous storytelling is so different from Western storytelling and, I think they’re ready to see a new style of storytelling, you know, with film or music, literature.” – Neil Diamond, co-director of So Surreal
Diversity in programming
Rachel Fox, the senior programmer at the Rio Theatre, says that they’re always excited for the crowd that VIFF brings when they rent out the venue, “We look forward to having them and welcoming a diverse roster of films that might not necessarily play at the Rio and also usually a pretty rambunctious crowd.”
Fox thinks that VIFF does a good job in terms of their broad array of content, and that their diversity in the films shown has always been there, “not just from people who make the content, but what the content is and what it represents and what it speaks to.”