Lindsay McIntyre wins Women in the Director's Chair 2021 Feature Film Award valued at $250K

Lindsay McIntyre wins WIDC Feature Film Award: Close to $250K in-kind services and rentals to be presented at Whistler Film Festival

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Vancouver, Canada (December 2021) – Multi-award-winning, multi-disciplinary Canadian artist and filmmaker of Inuit and Scottish descent, Lindsay McIntyre is the winner of the Women In the Director’s Chair’s 2021 Feature Film Award, an in-kind prize valued at nearly $250K, and designed to back the production of more narrative feature films directed by women. This year’s award will support the dramatic feature film, The Words We Can’t Speak, inspired by the lived experiences of McIntyre’s Inuk grandmother in the later 1930’s.

I’m just endlessly grateful to the jury, to WIDC and the sponsors of the award.” says Lindsay McIntyre. “This project is extremely important to me. In sharing Kumaa’naaq’s story, I’m excited to work with community to bring this project to life and especially to create opportunities for other young artists within those communities. I hope this film may be a way for people to reconnect and reclaim this story in a way that is good for them each individually.”

“Lindsay McIntyre is an important artistic voice, and her story was a clear choice for the peer jury,” says Carol Whiteman, award-winning WIDC producer who provides executive producing services as part of the award. “We are all going to learn so much from this compelling story, and also from how Lindsay plans to co-create and share it.”

For the past twenty-five years, WIDC has been working on a director-by-director basis to address the slow-to-change statistics around the funding of women-directed feature films. Since 2009, the WIDC Feature Film Award has supported a dozen multiple award-winning feature-length films by Canadian women directors including Katrin Bowen (Amazon Falls); Lulu Keating (Lucille’s Ball); Ana Valine (Sitting on the Edge of Marlene); Siobhan Devine (The Birdwatcher); Kathleen Hepburn (Never Steady, Never Still); Jordan Canning (Suck It Up!); Gloria Ui Young Kim (Queen of the Morning Calm); Marie Clements (Red Snow); and Sonia Bonspille Boileau (Rustic Oracle). Pamela Gallant (Monica’s News) is in the polish and packaging phase while 2020 winner, director Kim Albright and her producer Madeleine Davis aim to go to camera Winter 2022 on With Love and a Major Organ, with the support of awards sponsors and Telefilm Canada. The recently launched Dawn, Her Dad & the Tractor, written and directed by Shelley Thompson is screening at the Whistler Film Festival in person and online December 17 to 31, 2021, where the film is up for the festival’s Borsos prize.

The 2021 award is being presented virtually December 2 at the Whistler Film Festival, one of the world’s premiere festivals which has made a commitment to championing women in the industry both in front of and behind the camera.

Background

Lindsay McIntyre is a filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist of Inuit and settler Scottish descent. She has an MFA in Film Production from Condordia University and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Alberta. Her multiple award-wining short documentaries, experimental films and expanded cinema performances are often process-based and for some she has also made her own 16mm film with handmade silver gelatinous emulsion. Working in 16mm film using experimental and handmade techniques, her short films circle themes of portraiture, place, form and personal histories. She was named the Victor Martyn Lynch-Stauton recipient for Excellence in Media Arts by the Canada Council (2013), was honoured with the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award (Hnatyshyn Foundation, 2017) and her personal documentary Her Silent Life won Best Experimental Film at imaginNATIVE (2012). She has been a member of the Double Negative Collective, EMO Collective, artist-run film labs, and an international consortium of emulsioneers. Having made 40 short films over the past 20 years, she is transitioning to the field of narrative to make powerful and authentic features and series as a director, beginning with her fisrt feature The Words We Can’t Speak. She is honoured to have participated in the 2020-2021 online edition of Women In the Director’s Chair Story & Leadership program as well as Women In View’s Five In Focus Indigenous edition 2021. Recent projects include an animated documentary for Quamajuq, the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s new Inuit Art Centre, Ajjiglingiluktaaqtugut: We Are All Different (2021) which earned a special mention as one to 2021 VIFF’s Best Short, a Telus Optik Local documentary Final Roll-Out: The Story of Film (2018) and a monumental projection-mapping installation on the Vancover Art Gallery, If These Wallls (2019). She is an Associate Professor of Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design on unceded Coast Salish territories and she teaches film anywhere else that people will listen. She is the mother of Alice Miron.

Stuck between two worlds in the small community of Igluligaarjuk, Nunavut, Kumaa’naaq (koo-MAT-na), a seasoned Inuk translator skillfully navigates dealings between Inuit and the RCMP. The Words We Can’t Speak is a drama inspired by lived experiences that shares the story of one woman’s silent determination to keep those she loves safe and to preserve that which she holds most dear. The film is written and will be directed and produced by Lindsay McIntyre along with producer by Katrina Beatty (I Think, I Do; Before I Changed My Mind) and executive producer, Carol Whiteman (Rustic Oracle; Red Snow).

Women In the Director’s Chair (WIDC) – first presented in 1997 by ACTRA, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Women In Film and Television Vancouver, WIDC is administered by the national non-profit society Creative Women Workshops Association. WIDC offers mentorship for Canadian women screen directors, along with project development and production awards to help them get their narrative stories on screen. With more than 300 award-winning director alumnae across Canada, over the last twenty-five years WIDC has advanced the voices of a generation of women screen directors.

WIDC is presented with major support from Telefilm Canada and with the participation of Creative BC, ACTRA National, Actra Fraternal Benefit Society, Independent Production Fund; WIDC appreciates community collaborations with TIFF, VIFF, Reelworld Film Festival, Vancouver International Women In Film Festival, Female Eye Film Festival, St John’s International Women’s Film Festival, Crazy 8’s, and the Whistler Film Festival.

WIDC Feature Film Award is valued at nearly $250K and is supported by some of Canada’s most influential screen industry companies including Sim Complete, Panavision Canada, Keslow Camera, William F. White International, Company 3, Elemental Post Productions, North Shore Studios, The Bridge Studios, Vancouver Film Studios, Poste Moderne, Walter Lighting & Grip, MELS, The Research House Clearance Services Inc., Descriptive Video Works, Front Row Insurance Brokers Inc, Line 21 Media Services.

WIDC recognizes the term Woman/Women is in an evolution of language and note that our intention in our use is to be fully inclusive of underrepresented persons who may or may not identify as women and share the goals and values of WIDC to promote these marginalized voices and stories. Further, we gratefully acknowledge that the WIDC program originates from the traditional and unceded lands of the Coast Salish people, including the xmkym (Musqueam), Swxwu7mesh (Squamish), and slilwta (Tseil-wau-tuth) Nations. We also acknowledge the Indigenous Nations on whose traditional lands our guests and participants live, work and play.