Northern film has never had an opportunity to expose its celluloid to an Outside audience quite like that of the Canada Winter Games.
And the Yukon Film Society knows it.
Enter the Cinematic Territories festival, coming to the Yukon Arts Centre this Sunday.
“This is the first time that films made by northern Canadians have been screened in the same venue in the same day in the same event,” said film society technical director Andrew Connors.
“I think visitors are going to be surprised by the content and the power of the storytelling that they see. It’s beyond what they would expect of northern stories.”
Cinematic Territories will feature 17 films and new media productions from artists from the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Nunavik.
The festival has been created to coincide with the Games and to capture a diverse audience from across Canada, an audience northern filmmakers usually only dream about.
Several beginning Yukon filmmakers will make their directorial debuts.
Local playwright turned filmmaker Celia McBride will debut Last Stop for Miles, a short film she made with her sister, Clara McBride.
Last Stop for Miles was shot in Whitehorse.
So too was Contained Chaos: the Kinetic Art of Philippe LeBlond.
The five-minute short is Whitehorse director Rod Jacob’s first film.
He’s excited about the festival’s potential, he said.
“I think it’s a great opportunity to show off the budding film culture up here to people from around the county,” said Jacob.
Cinematic Territories is broken into three territorial groupings.
Films from Nunavut and Nunavik kick off the event at noon; the NWT program begins at 2 p.m., and the Yukon program starts at 4 p.m.
At 6 p.m. there will be a filmmakers’ gala where the audience can mingle with McBride, Jacob and several other northern filmmakers.
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen — the latest feature film by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, the award-winning creators of Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner — will be screened in high-definition at 7 p.m.
Tickets are $7 for film society members for each regional festival and $8 for non-members; a day pass is $25.
The bar is open until 10 p.m.