Aboriginal filmmakers learning more about their craft

Caleb Magiskan of Thunder Bay is planning a make a short film in the coming months.
But the 21-year-old Aroland First Nation member felt he needed to learn more about the trade and craft of filmmaking, so he took part in Docs North, a workshop program aimed at emerging filmmakers in Thunder Bay and northern Ontario.
“It was really insightful,” Magiskan said of his experience in the workshops. “Just the stories and what they teach you helps a lot when you go back to your own life and use these skills for your own films and projects.”
In the two-day workshop program, Magiskan said he wanted to learn more about how to acquire funding as well as to enhance his storytelling skills.
“That’s the one thing I’m not too sure about,” he said of funding. “Being a filmmaker is not the most profitable career choice and I wanted to try get funding. So now I know what companies and councils to go to.”
It is the second year of Docs North, which Magiskan took part in last year. It is part of the Bay Street Film Festival, which took place concurrently with Docs North. Last year, Magiskan’s short drama, Gas through the Glass, won the People Choice’s Award at the film festival.
This year, Magiskan is writing a drama about a struggling artist who was abandoned as a newborn by his father and raised by his mother, who struggles with prescription drug addiction.
“It’s about him drawing portraits of what (his father) might look like,” Magiskan said. “It’s what he goes through while doing the portrait. It’s based on my own experiences.”
Docs North is organized by Kelly Saxberg, who also coordinates the Bay Street Film Festival. She was inspired to start Docs North last year after taking part in a similar workshop program in Nunavut, which focused on teaching and networking with emerging filmmakers in isolated communities.
“I’m a filmmaker in an isolated community from Toronto trying to make films and tell our stories,” she said. “But there’s also people in Sioux Lookout, in Moose Factory, who are trying to make films too.”
Docs North had filmmakers from as far away as Uruguay come in to mentor the participants. But where last year the participants filmed for one day and edited the next, the program did not receive the same amount of funding and had to reduce the program to two days with no filming.
Instead, Saxberg said, to go with the two-day workshops, the program provided small kickstart grants to northern filmmakers in communities such as Moose Factory, Peawanuck and Sioux Lookout to work on their film projects.
Allen Auksaq of Igloolik, Nunavut, was unable to attend Docs North last year but jumped at the chance this year.
Auksaq produces films when he is not working his government job. Now he wants to produce a six-part series about the impact Western food has had on his people.
“We’re going to have an Inuk person go on a 60-day traditional diet to see if his health will improve,” he said.
Auksaq said he wants to make documentaries to tell the stories of his culture to the world in a medium that everyone looks at. He said he enjoyed his experience at Docs North.
“I’m learning a lot from everyone and I’m having fun talking to everyone and listening to the projects that they have,” he said. “With the project I’m working on, it makes me want to do more.”