LIBERATORY IMAGE-MAKING: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SOVEREIGNTY AND FUTURITY IN INDIGENOUS-LED NONFICTION CINEMA
12:10 - 13:10 Thursday 19th Mar 2026 / 60 min
Can a medium such as film that has had coloniality embedded in it so deeply be truly embraced as an Indigenous cultural expression? How can Indigenous cosmogonies, knowledge systems and philosophies be expressed in film and/or should they be? Involving filmmakers, film commissioners and talent support experts, this conversation will seek to unpack these multi-facetted questions.
Narrative sovereignty is one of the many responses by global majority, marginalised and racialised film communities to the dispossession, extraction, predation and epistemic violence that has characterised the dominant film industry’s gazes, image making and representations of their communities since the inception of cinema itself. Exemplified in well- known examples such as 1922 “Nanook of the North” documentary by Robert Flaherty – among all of those affected by the pathologies of the (ethnographic) gaze that can be characterised as objectifying, racist, reductive and stereotypical – Indigenous nations have perhaps been the most affected of all by the production of such images by others.
In parallel to the formulation of “pathways and protocols” which act as a guide to non- Indigenous filmmakers who wish to work with Indigenous communities in equitable, reciprocal and mutually beneficial frameworks, narrative sovereignty initially arose as an act of cinematic reclamation. Echoing Gayatri Spivak’s famous question of “Can the subaltern speak?” and inspired by the groundbreaking works of the pioneering mothers of Indigenous cinema, Alanis Obomsawin and Merata Mita, the term was also prefigured by slogans
carried by the global Indigenous filmmaking community such as “Nothing about us, without us” which assert the desire for Indigenous communities to have the agency to determine how they appear on camera, what they chose to reveal of their culture and how they tell or show their stories or other cultural manifestations onscreen.
This conversation is interested in exploring the directions narrative sovereignty is now taking beyond its initial phase of response, reclamation, ownership and its decentering of the harmful filmic contexts that gave rise to its creation. If narrative sovereignty is also a question of making films by and for a community, what are the implications for the way these films are made and for their engagement with Indigenous audiences?
Involving filmmakers, film commissioners and talent support experts, this conversation will seek to unpack these multi-facetted questions.
