Professional Workshops

• Presentation
• Schedule
• Documentaries: Internet and platform convergence
• Amerindian fiction: groundwork and hopes
• Audiovisual production in Amerindian languages (at Kahnawake)

STUDIO DE L'INIS
301 de Maisonneuve East Blvd., Montreal
Thursday June 14 from 9:00 AM

and

KATERI HALL
Kahnawake
Saturday June 16 at 2:00 PM

Presentation

Thursday June 14, at the INIS, professional workshops will take place in the framework of the 2007 Montreal First Peoples Festival.

One will deal with the television/web meshing in the production of documentaries. Benoît Beaudoin from ECP (the co-producers of Tshinnanu), Marc Beaudet from Turbulent (the co-producers of Ullumi) and Claire Dion from Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund will discuss this new reality.

Another one will address the topic of "Fiction and Amerindians". This professional workshop will evolve around three authentic projects still in a development phase. All the professions involved face their own creative challenges: adapting a novel or play to the screen, casting Amerindian roles, portraying a worldview specific to First Nations, and production challenges: funding, support for innovative projects, the role of broadcasters, choice and role of Amerindian partners. Ian Boyd of Films de l'Isle, Yves Sioui-Durand, actor and playwright, Claude Gagnon, producer and filmmaker, Paul Rickard, filmmaker, Petrer Haynes, scriptwriter, Tim Southam, director, Louis Hamelin scriptwriter and Rachelle Alouki Labbé, producer and director will participate in various panels on this theme.

Simultaneous translation available (English-French, both ways).

Another workshop, about productions in ancestral First Nations languages, is organised in Kahnawake Saturday June 16 in the afternoon. (English only)

Professionals interested can register by email at sara@nativelynx.qc.ca Priority will be given to those who manage projects with First Nations.

Schedule

9:00 AM	Welcoming, coffee and muffins
9:30 AM	Documentaries: Internet and platform convergence Benoît Beaudoin from Entreprises de Création Panacom (ECP), co-producer of Tshinnanu ; Marc Beaudet from Turbulent, co-producer of Ullumi, ; Claire Dion from the Fonds de la radiodiffusion et des nouveaux médias de Bell
10:30 AM	Amerindian fiction Ian Boyd and André Dudemaine : introduction
10:35 AM	The story and adaptation Peter Haynes, Louis Hamelin, Yves Sioui-Durand
11:35 AM	Lunch
13:30 PM	Crafting films and developing lifelike characters Tim Southam, Yves Sioui-Durand, Paul Rickard, Claude Gagnon
14:30 PM	Is an Amerindian fictional cinema possible? Rachelle Alouki Labbé, Ian Boyd, André Dudemaine

Documentaries: Internet and platform convergence

The Internet is continuing to change how things get done in today's society and documentary productions are no exception. More and more, broadcasters want documentaries to be paired with a web reference enabling audiences enthralled by a subject to delve deeper into the topic by going onto a www site designed for this very purpose. The headway new medias are making into conventional TV production/broadcast call for a new mindset on the producers' part. An accurate analysis of the possibilities of television/web meshing can make the difference between a project that remains on the drawing board and another that gets the go-ahead and secures funding.

Land InSights is organizing a workshop with specialists on this topic looking into this new reality: when is it opportune to develop a project designed with integrated broadcast and webcast content? How do we apportion the functions of each support and articulate the interplay between the two media? What information is more appropriate on a web site as opposed to what is already featured in the TV version of a documentary?

Panel: Benoît Beaudoin from Entreprises de Création Panacom (ECP), co-producer of Tshinnanu, Marc Beaudet from Turbulent, co-producer of Ullumi; Claire Dion, associate director, Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund.

Amerindian fiction: groundwork and hopes

A new stage takes shape in the development of Quebec First Nations productions (film, television and new media)

Feature films such as Visage Pâle (1985), Windigo (1994) and Le Silence des fusils (1996), were so at odds with film productions of their time that they remained experimental, failing to make a real breakthrough. Despite their spectacular contribution to the portrayal of subjects specific to Quebec's Aboriginal peoples and their systematic use of Amerindian actors (often in their film débuts) no production at the time dared to follow up on the path blazed by Claude Gagnon, Robert Morin or Arthur Lamothe, with feature films.

But now times are a changing: global success for Kunuk, APTN up and running, a surge in production of novels and plays by Amerindian authors (Sioui-Durand, Highway, Boyden, etc.), broadcast of the first 100% Amerindian series Moccasin Flats, training tailored to Aboriginal actors' needs at the National Theatre School, new generations of Aboriginal filmmakers trained in documentary work but tempted by fiction, commercial success for Quebec feature films, cultural effervescence in Aboriginal communities sparked by the arrival of Wapikoni mobile...

This time we feel that on the basis of such changes, Aboriginal presence in Quebec fiction can once again attempt to take flight and take its rightful place. Because there are many approaches to it, they are based on prior experimentation (insertion of fictional sequences in documentaries, training for actors, creative workshops), that production companies are willing to take the time for projects to mature before going ahead with their development, that several players are involved in a convergent process, or that we are in the presence of an underlying movement whose driving forces are still in an adjustment phase and must be implemented before the big moves get underway.

So it is a strategic moment to take the reflection deeper, further the dialogue on our hunches and inspirations, take stock of existing or developing resources, measure our dreams up against realistic expectations, open our toolkits to discuss sketches and blueprints, forge solidarity, strengthen the nucleus of a network among producers or other players involved now or soon to be in the new fields we undertake to clear.

Thanks to partnership with the Films de l'Isle production company, LandInSights wants to organise a professional workshop around three authentic projects still in a development phase. All the professions involved face their own creative challenges: adapting a novel or play to the screen, casting Amerindian roles, portraying a worldview specific to First Nations, and production challenges: funding, support for innovative projects, the role of broadcasters (APTN is not capable of backing large-scale projects on its own, choice and role of Amerindian partners.

The workshop will be designed with a view to the organic unity that is the very essence of production work and enable the participants to understand input as elements of a continuous chain that starts out from the author's creative inspiration and concludes with the projection of a finished product on large and small screens.

Hamlet, le Malécite; a film by Yves Sioui-Durand directly based on his play with the same title, screenplay co-written with Louis Hamelin
A Good Thing on a Bad Day; a film by Louis Bélanger, based on an anthology of short stories by Joseph Boyden, screenplay by Peter Haynes in partnership with Marc Robitaille and Paul Rickard
Kiss of the Fur Queen; a film by Tim Southam, based on the novel by Thomson Hoighway, screenplay co-written with Peter Haynes.

3 types of challenges according to the professions taking part in the project Screenplay: adaptation, dialogues, viewing a written universe in cinematographic language.
Actors and director: choice of language(s) actors will speak, casting, directing Amerindian actors and prior training (or not) for these actors.
Producers: funding, sales, financial set-up, distribution.

And the underlying question: what is an authentically Amerindian film?

INTRODUCTION: IAN BOYD AND ANDRÉ DUDEMAINE

Panel 1
The story and adaptation
Peter Haynes, Louis Hamelin, Yves Sioui-Durand

Panel 2
Crafting films and developing lifelike characters
Tim Southam, Yves Sioui-Durand, Paul Rickard, Claude Gagnon

Panel 3
Is an Amerindian fictional cinema possible?
Ian Boyd, Rachelle Alouki Labbé

By its very structure, this one-day workshop will be at once a master class (through the quality and experience of its panellists) a means of strengthening the network of producers and cultural stakeholders gravitating around the Amerindian milieu, a place to read through projects still in mutation and a moment for reflection in the development of a cinematograpy drawing upon the life of the First Nations.

Audiovisual production in Amerindian languages

KATERI HALL
Kahnawake
Saturday June 16 at 2:00 PM

Luc Lainé, a Wendat producer, from the Les productions K8e K8e company and Paul Rickard, a Cree director, have both managed productions incorporating ancestral First Nations languages.

Mikuan et Ashini (Les productions K8e K8e) is a series inspired by tales from the Innu tradition. A French version and an Innu language version were produced simultaneously. The series has an educational focus, as an Innu language learning aid.

Several documentaries by Paul Rickard, including Aboriginal architecture, living architecture, exist in Cree and Mohawk language versions. The director is now in the process of filming a documentary on Mohawk community efforts to protect their language, a subject he had already touched upon in the series Finding our talk.