March 2011
 Director Tracey Deer (Mohawk) received the Don Haig Award for emerging documentary filmmakers at the 2009 HotDocs documentary festival, and in 2008 was named one of “The Next 25: Canada's Rising Stars and Dealmakers” by Playback magazine. Deer has recently directed the pilot for Mohawk Girls, a humorous television series to be on APTN, developed from her recent short fiction Escape Hatch, which had its world premiere at the 2009 Native American Film + Video Festival. The title for the upcoming series is taken from Deer’s 2004 documentary about the lives of teenage girls at Kahnawake Reserve, where Deer grew up. Her first solo work with the Native-owned production company Rezolution Pictures, the documentary Mohawk Girls won the Alanis Obomsawin Best Documentary Award at the 2005 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.
Deer’s Club Native, also produced by Rezolution Pictures, won two awards at the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television’s Gemini Awards, the Canada Award for best Canadian Multi-Cultural Program, and for Deer herself, the Gemini for Best Documentary Writing. Club Native won the Colin Low Award for Best Canadian Documentary at DOXA/Documentary Film and Video Festival, in addition to awards at imagineNative and First Peoples’ Festival in Montreal. Deer has recently worked with independent producer Paul Rickard to produce Kanien’kehaka: Living the Language, a documentary about Mohawk language immersion schools, and to direct an episode in Rickard’s Finding Our Talk series on indigenous languages, produced for three seasons for APTN.
Deer joined Rezolution Pictures directly out of college to work on One More River: The Deal that Split the Cree (co-directed with Neil Diamond). The film won the Best Documentary Award at the 2005 Rendez-vous du cinema québécois in Montreal and was nominated for Best Social/Political Documentary at the Geminis.
Deer received a BA in film studies from Dartmouth College. She divides her time between Montreal and the Kahnawake Reserve.
"All of my work to date has dealt with Native issues because
that is what I feel passionate about. Our stories and our communities
have so much vibrancy to offer and I'm very committed to expressing
that on the big and small screen. With all of my work, my ultimate
goal is to try to make a difference, even if it is just with one
person. I think that film and video, whether it is documentary
or fiction, are very powerful mediums, and it is important to
respect that enormous influence. I aim to create films that engage
and, hopefully, enlighten the audience in some way. It's not always
possible, of course, but that's what I strive for whenever I get
behind the camera."
Screened by NMAI
Image credits:
Tracey Deer - courtesy of the filmmaker; Tracey Deer - courtesy
of the filmmaker
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