Home Made Visible Commissioned Artists

Home Made Visible,​ an archival project by ​The Regent Park Film Festival​, has the pleasure of commissioning seven projects by media artists from Indigenous and visible minority communities across Canada. With critical support from our project partner and artist-run centre, ​Charles Street Video​, artists will receive access to production equipment and facilities to bring their works to life. A complete list of commissioned filmmakers is provided below.

Home Made Visible​ celebrates the domestic histories of Indigenous and visible minority communities by digitizing and archiving their home videos and then reflecting on the stories that they have the power to bring to life. The commissioned projects reflect on how how archives shape our relationship to the past, how can we re-frame them to build new histories? And in what ways can this inquiry into familial and community archives connect the vast and varied histories of Indigenous people in Canada and the visible minority communities who have settled here?

“Home Made Visible is a welcome effort that addresses the lack of Indigenous contributions to our public archives. I’m looking forward to being a part of a group of artists and scholars who are enthusiastic about changing the nature of archives to reflect a nuanced Canadian history full of a variety of experiences belonging to people of colour and Indigenous people.”​- participating filmmaker Jennifer Dysart (Hamilton, ON)

“This project can expand awareness in a time when we are seeing so much anti-immigrant sentiment...I look forward to co-creating something that re-defines what being Canadian means.​” participating filmmaker Maya Bastian (Toronto, ON)

The six commissioned filmmakers were selected by a jury from a nationwide callout. A seventh special curated visual artist was commissioned to compliment their moving image works All works will premiere at the 16th Annual Regent Park Film Festival, Nov 14-17th, 2018. The works will then tour through library branches across Canada into 2019 with accompanying workshops.

Our commissioned artists are:

Aeyliya Husain​ is a documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on issues of representation, war, women and photography. She started her career at the National Film Board of Canada and has exhibited her work festivals nationally and internationally.

Landed, is a short experimental documentary film that views the various stages of the Regent Park development from 1949 to the current transformation, while critiquing the use of land, urban living and how population growth has dictated lifestyle. The film combines locational filming, archival footage, and photographs with narration.

Jennifer Dysart​ is a director of short films. She is also a set dresser/decorator, assistant director, a field producer, an archival researcher, and production coordinator. Jennifer was born
in Alberta, raised in BC and has Cree roots from South Indian Lake, Manitoba. She is an archives enthusiast with a deep love of found footage and experimental films.

Violet's Caibou: can combining found footage from public archives with home movies change the absence of Indigenous influence in Canada’s archives?

Lisa Jodoin​ is a writer/filmmaker working out of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Her short films include ​Tracing Blood​, a video poem about Indigenous identity, and ​In Search of Laura Fearn​. She recently completed a feature length documentary for the New Brunswick Aboriginal People’s Council and the Urban Aboriginal Knowledge Network Atlantic.

Part documentary, part scripted narrative, this [untitled] film explores the ways that our histories often find us and the surprising ways that archival collections can link us to our ancestors.

Maya Bastian​ is a writer, a filmmaker and an artist. Her work often explores socio-political themes as they relate to ideas of community and culture. In 2017 she was a recipients of the Al Magee Screenwriter Mentorship and included in Reelworld Film Festival’s Emerging 20.

The Arrival Archives will be a short, experimental documentary created to highlight the stories of those who are contributing to our changing cultural landscape in a way that serves their identities and memories.

Nadine Arpin​ is a Two-Spirited Métis filmmaker based in Sioux Lookout, Ontario where her film production company Cedar Water Films is located. Since 2014 she has been producing and directing independent short films which have screened both nationally and internationally.

Mi Vida Canadiense: in Cali, Columbia, Luis España married a Cree woman from Canada and returned with her to NWO to be the only Latin American immigrant in a town of 5000 people. There Luis found, arguably, the most iconic job in Canada, driving and operating the Zamboni at the local rink.

Parastoo Anoushahpour and Faraz Anoushahpour ​have worked in collaboration since 2013. Using various performative structures to work in relation to specific sites, their projects explore collaboration as a way to upset the authority of a singular narrator or position.

Pictures of Departure: Tashrih-e Mansuri explores the crucial role of the body as a source of consciousness establishing limits between the self and the other. The film moves between the physical body containing lived experiences of the self, to the represented body of the other as it is archived in institutions through language, illustration and text.

Melisse Watson​ is a disruptionist, earthworker and multidisciplinary artist. Through the archiving of activism work done by Black and Indigenous peoples in Tkaronto, and exploring access, gender, conflict, Melisse explores speculative futures and their preparations.

A was adopted. Where I am from is somewhere I have never been. The stories from the grandparents I never knew, and aunties I’ve never seen - though can sometimes hear them laughing, or smell their southern cooking. In Marietta, Georgia there are more people that share my blood than any place I was ever raised - even my birthplace in Americas west coast, on
Gabrielino-Tongva Territory. This is a place, back in Cherokee and Chickasaw Territory, that will be my home made visible.

For a full summary of Home Made Visible, please click here.

 2018