JUSTICE4REEL - CREATIVE LAB

The Justice4Reel Creative Lab will take place December 6-8, 2018 in Edmonton, Alberta. This three day event will bring together a team of 12 filmmakers from across the Prairies and Territories to learn, collaborate and create media for social change. Participants will take part in skills-building workshops, mentorship opportunities, film screenings and share ideas with innovative storytellers and filmmakers from across Canada.

Each participant will have the chance to pull apart, refine and expand upon their project idea with guidance from established filmmakers and industry professionals that will act as mentors and moderators to lead the participants the ethical impacts and components of storytelling, while learning what it takes to craft a professional video treatment for a variety of audiences.

Meet the mentors:

David N.O.

Demo Reel

A director, editor and writer based out of Edmonton Alberta. He loves working in different genres of film, from social satire, documentary films, music videos, Slasher horror flicks and film noir. DOJO Productions is his production company. David graduated from Grant MacEwan's Motion Image and Design program in 2011.

Michael B. MacDonald

As a graduate student, Michael was drawn to surrealism and made short experimental films on music topics that focused on the experience of a “musicking being”. He began to explore how digital cinema might be used to both report on, and engage viewer affect. Michael is especially interested in the work done by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on non-representational semiotics, asignification, part-signs, intensities.

“Written ethnographies are fully engaged in representation where cinema has more flexibility in this regard. Cine-ethnography is not just an ethnography that uses a different medium to produce the same report but is a different thing that uses a collection of linguistic semiotics, sound semiotics, gestural semiotics of the body, faciality, semiotics of the earth, as well as the intensities of colour. Cine-ethnomusicology explores how digital cinema production can be used to explore musicking.” Michael B. MacDonald

Unlike traditional ethnographic methods, Michael is not exclusively committed to observational documentary and cinema verite methods. He produces documentary films as well as fictional or quasi-fictional film based on his own ethnographic research.

Jack Belhumeur

Jack started film making in 2007 with Tom Bernier of an old school production company called Edmonton Film School, which is where he met David N.O. who has been a close friend and brother in art of mine ever since. Jack now lives in Thunder Bay Ontario where he operate "infinity blue films;" his work there has grown the filmmaking community in the city and the surrounding communities. He is the facilitator of his own 1 week filmmaking workshops which he does with youth on First Nations communities in Ontario. Jack aims to inspire people young and old to create new ideas and use his own talents in art and film as a storyteller and activist for the greater good.

Respect your Elders, Chum by Jack Belhumeur


Shawn Tse

Shawn is a Chinese Canadian artist/filmmaker born and raised in Toronto. He graduated in 2006 from Film/Video at York University and soon after he had the privilege to teach English and travel in Asia. His career in education developed as a teacher in Taiwan & Hong Kong for the next decade and motivated him to get his my masters in Psychology of Education.

Things began to take a turn in 2012, when Shawn was introduced to a group of indie-filmmakers in Hong Kong thanks to 48 film fest, his passion for film was refuelled. Since then he has been producing film/video under the company Fallout Media (founded by Edwin Lee) and eventually moved to Amiskwaciwâskahikan/Edmonton under the same brand and vision (www.falloutmedia.ca).

Aside from Fallout, Shawn has been sharing his passion and experience in film/video & art in various community spaces/projects. He is really impressed by how supportive and collaborative our community organizations are when he approaches them with new media projects. One example of this- www.filmforthefuture.com, a film camp empowering the voices of our newcomer youth in the city.

His latest project revolves around the histories, social practice and art creation based around Edmonton's ever-changing Chinatown.


Heather Hatch

Heather likes to tell stories; however, she never thought about using film until four years ago and subsequently fell in love. She loves the idea that you can use this platform to see the world from different perspectives. Heather prefers to do work that represents strong female leads and stories.

She is currently working on a feature length Documentary called the People vs. Goliath, it follows the people who are affected by the construction of a multi- billion dollar dam called Site C on the peace river.

Here are some of the things that Heather has worked on:

 

Jamie Bourque

Jamie Bourque is the founder and owner of Multipel Inc.- a 100% indigenous-owned and operated production company established in 2009. Multipel Inc. immediately became a parent company in Sweetgrass and Sage, Inc., which produced two seasons of the APTN documentary series Chaos & Courage, and the one-hour doc Our Home and Native Land: Heroine Healers. Currently in production with our first feature-length documentary, ‘re-kən-ˌsi-lē-ˈā-shən - The Stark Truth’ and interactive memory work platform, ‘Pehonan’.

Multipel Inc. have been producing content since 2008 and their projects - such as ‘The Heir’ a docudrama digital series which explored the stories of Residential School survivors and the intergenerational effects, was showcased at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013, have been cutting edge. Their projects have received funding from Bell Media, Rogers, Canada Media Fund, Alberta Media Fund, DameBlanche, APTN, Super Channel, PBS, Visible Films, CBC, Canadian Media Production Association, and Bundesstiftung our Aufarbeitung Der SED-Diktatur. In addition, they are grant recipients of he Alberta Foundation for the Arts in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2015 and 2016, and Canada Council for the Arts in 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2016.

Iman Kassam

Iman is a journalist, videographer, LGBTQ+ activist, and communications geek living in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. A weekend adventurer, Iman makes short horror films and live music videos.




Neximar Alarcon