![](https://aboriginal.ecuad.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/TWWCS-header-1024x582.jpeg)
The filmmaker and ECU faculty member brings a pair of personal projects to the renowned fellowship programs in New Mexico and New York.
Artist, filmmaker and Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) faculty member Lindsay McIntyre has been awarded a pair of prestigious fellowships from the Sundance Institute and Forge Project.
Having returned from the initial in-person intensive at the Sundance Institute’s Native Lab, held this year in New Mexico, Lindsay spoke in glowing terms about the experience.
“It’s an incredible group of people,” she says of her peers and the mentorship team at Sundance. “They’re brilliant and very supportive and it’s made a world of difference to have people care so deeply and invest in thinking about what I’m doing, what it could be and how it could happen. It was fantastic being in Santa Fe.”
Lindsay’s focus at Sundance is the script for her upcoming feature film, The Words We Can’t Speak. She’s been working with the story in various forms since 2004, but writing the dramatic feature has been a focus for the past five years.
The narrative is based on the lived experience of Lindsay’s Inuk grandmother in the late 1930s. A version of the story animates Lindsay’s recent, award-winning short, NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ (The South Wind), which Lindsay views as a kind of preview of the broader story she hopes to tell.
The Words We Can’t Speak represents Lindsay’s entry into feature-length drama. She notes the time she’s taken with development is a function of the care and integrity with which she insists on treating the story and its telling at every stage.
“To assume you can entertain somebody for two hours or that your story is important enough to tell at that length is not something I’ve ever felt before,” she says. “But this particular story is based on a true story, and in making it, I aim to honour my grandmother, the Inuit community connected to the story and the story itself. It will only be told once and it has to be done right. It’s a story I want everyone to feel in their bones.”
![](https://aboriginal.ecuad.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Shifting_ground_DOC_18-1024x683.jpeg)
Lindsay adds that community consultation and reciprocity have figured into every part of the film’s development and will continue to do so. For instance, shooting on location in Nunavut is a “non-negotiable,” she says. Likewise, it will be important to create mentorship opportunities for Inuit youth throughout pre-production and production and limit hierarchical filming structures.
This model for film production is unusual, Lindsay continues. However, filmmakers such as Zacharias Kunuk, Rhayne Vermette and Sarah Polley are already demonstrating how great films can be made while overturning longstanding paradigms.
“I think it’s important to hold fast to your vision for a project,” she says. “That’s how we make work that is unique, different and important, and that tells important stories.”
Read the full story on ECU News.