Documentary filmmaking

"I'm a recent reconnector with my community. My Great Grandma was taken away when she was a kid for residential school so my family was kind of disconnected until I came back, I think when I was 18, so a few years ago. So, I look for any opportunity to be involved in the community and, of course, as soon as I heard about this I was like 'I could do so many things!'

So my idea is that a lot of the Elders we...obviously, we use our Elders a lot, right, and we kind of, sometimes exhaust them with the amount of information that we need and the help and stuff, and the guidance so I really want to be able to interview them in what they want to talk about.

‍Like, if they want to tell me a story from my childhood I want it to be them running the interview versus like, us being like, 'Tell me about a time in your childhood.'

I really want to have a different way of collecting their information because most of the time we go there, we ask them questions, we record it and then we have everything in an archive but I feel like a different...it's almost like a more traditional way, like, kind of letting them teach us instead of us asking the questions -- is what I feel it's going to be. ‍And if they can tell me a story, and try to teach me something, I think it's going to be really fun, so that's the idea...

My Grandma, when she taught me things, it wasn't that she like wrote it down and I had to learn from a book it was - she showed me, and I'm a very visual learner because of that.

I think that the using film is very similar to that, because we learned from these things and that's kind of the way that our Elders would teach us, like, by showing us and telling us in like different ways, and I feel that it's a very traditional way of kind of learning, so I'm very excited about that."

“I just love the idea of mentorship. I've benefited from mentorship a lot in my life, and in my career particularly and it's sort of helped me grow by leaps and bounds. So I just jumped at the opportunity to sort of be able to help someone else in that way.

And I just think that working with new filmmakers really gives me a lot, it really benefits me creatively because, you know, often especially in filmmaking, and in all arts really, you're sort of doing a lot of different things to pay the bills and then sometimes your own projects and your own creativity gets a little bit quelled on the side because you're you know trying to make a living, and your art doesn't necessarily always pay for that.

I've done a little bit of training with emerging and new filmmakers and I just find that the energy and creativity that they bring really revitalizes me and makes me remember sort of why I'm excited about film in the first place.

And so, Logan, just even talking about being conscientious about your approach and really owning how you're going to approach these interviews [with Elders] is really exciting to me. And you know, I just want to be able to help water you and have you grow into a wonderful filmmaker, so yeah, it's very exciting.”‍