As part of the presentation of the exhibition Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story the MAC invites you to a conversation between Alanis Obomsawin, filmmaker, activist and singer, and Nicolas Renaud, artist, filmmaker, film editor and Assistant professor in First Peoples Studies at Concordia University. Their encounter will take place in the Salle Alanis-Obomsawin at the National Film Board of Canada, on Wednesday, January 15, 2025, at 6 p.m.
One of the most acclaimed Indigenous directors in the world, Alanis Obomsawin came to cinema from performance and storytelling. Hired by the NFB as a consultant in 1967, she has created an extraordinary body of work—56 films and counting—including landmark documentaries like Incident at Restigouche and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. The Abenaki director has received numerous international honours, and her work was showcased in a 2008 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Alanis Obomsawin has consistently succeeded in using public platforms to advance Indigenous concerns and tell Indigenous stories. She has done this so effectively and with such integrity as a documentary filmmaker working at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) that she has become a revered and beloved figure among Indigenous communities and is celebrated both in Canada and abroad. Obomsawin has created a model of Indigenous cinema that privileges the voices of her subjects while challenging the core assumptions (economic, environmental, political, epistemic, ontological) of a world system created by colonialism that still exists and with which we must contend today.
Nicolas Renaud is an artist, filmmaker, and film editor, as well as an associate professor of First Peoples studies at Concordia University. He has been creating installations and making documentary and experimental films since the 1990s, including the film La Nouvelle Rupert (Brave New River), a winner at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto in 2013. Recently, he has exhibited a series of installations (2021–24) inspired by seventeenth-century Huron-Wendat wampum belts and directed several short films, including Florent Vollant – Je rêve en innu (2021) and Holiday Native Land (2023, co-directed with Brian Virostek). He is a member of the Indigenous Futures Research Centre and the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre at Concordia University. His fields of research include Indigenous ecologies, history of the Wendat culture, wampum belts, and colonial relations in Québec. Of mixed Québec and Indigenous heritage, he is a member of the Huron-Wendat First Nation of Wendake.
