Ottawa – Presenting perspectives that are seldom if ever seen on screen is an integral part of the NFB’s mandate. The NFB gives a voice to groups that are systematically underrepresented in the media landscape, whether in front of or behind the camera, such as women, Indigenous people, official-language minority communities, ethnocultural communities, 2SLGBTQI+ communities and people living with disabilities. Below are some of the works launched in 2022–23 that demonstrate this diversity.
- The first Haida-language production, Now Is the Time is a unique project. Directed by Christopher Auchter, who’s originally from the Haida Gwaii archipelago (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), the film is helping to keep alive a language that currently has only 24 speakers.
- The feature-length documentary Ever Deadly is a film and musical experience featuring Inuk throat-singer and avant-garde artist Tanya Tagaq. Emerging from a collaboration between Tagaq and Chelsea McMullan, this work intersperses concert footage with impressive sequences filmed on the land in Nunavut.
- 2022–2023 also saw the release of films made during the 13th edition of Hothouse, a mentorship program for emerging animation creators, supported by the English Program Animation & Interactive Studio. Three anglophone filmmakers from Quebec took part in the latest season of the program to create animated shorts under the theme “100.”
- From the Canadian francophonie, the documentary feature KOROMOUSSO – Grande sœur (KOROMOUSSO: Big Sister), co-directed by Habibata Ouarme, an emerging Canadian filmmaker with family roots in Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, and Jim Donovan, an established, award-winning bilingual director, explores the phenomenon of female genital mutilation (FGM) from the perspective of those who’ve experienced it. With great sensitivity, the film examines the shame felt by women who’ve been subjected to FGM and now live in Canada, a country largely unresponsive to their experience, because although it has banned this practice, it does not offer the reconstructive surgery that could improve their sexual health. This is Ouarme’s first feature-length documentary. It was produced by the NFB’s Quebec, Canadian Francophonie & Acadian Documentary Studio and launched at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in Toronto and London in March 2023.