Program Length: 87 minutes
NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ (The South Wind)
Lindsay McIntyre (Inuk/Setler) • 16.5m • Canada • 2023 • English, Inuktitut
Having left Nunavut with her mother Kumaa’naaq (koo-MAT-na) in 1938, young Marguerite must negotiate the unspoken pressures of being Inuk in her new life in the South. When an extraordinary letter arrives from home, Marguerite discovers what’s really expected of her. Based on a true story.
The Return
Marina Alofagia McCartney (Samoan/English/Romani) • 14.5m • New Zealand • 2025 • English, Samoan
During the tattooing ceremony of a SAMOAN WOMAN by an obscured SAMOAN TATTOOIST, LUPESINA is rejected for not speaking Samoan. After confronting her mother, she navigates traumatic childhood memories as well as her current reality; she is dead.
Facing judgements about her mixed heritage, she returns to the Samoan women who shunned her and the Samoan Tattooist, revealed as another version of herself. Defiant, Lupesina claims the tattooing tool and a door opens to The Gateway. Samoan tattoos appear on her legs and Lupesina leaps toward her return home.
Distant Roots
Caleb Teaupa (Tongan-Māori) • 15m • 2025 • New Zealand • English
In New Zealand, a Tongan father in his seventies labours through the unchanging rhythm of construction work, long after his children have grown and moved on. As the days blur together and time slips away, he is haunted by distance, from his roots in Vava’u, Tonga, and from the family he is still trying to hold onto.
Irninnu Unikaara
Ipeelie Ootoova (Inuk) • 12m • Canada • Inuktitut with Eng. subtitles
A young Inuk finds out his girlfriend is pregnant, which triggers old trauma and leads him to go caribou hunting.
Tenfa
Nihaarika Negi (Kinnauri) • 30m • 2025 • India • Hindi
Somewhere in a Kinnauri folk song, there is the name of a herb. The herb can stop a woman from bleeding to death during childbirth. The song is remembered in part by a blind elder, half-forgotten by a government-certified midwife, and entirely unknown to a teenage girl. The village where all three live is itself disappearing — hollowed out by over 142 hydroelectric projects that have dried riverbeds, stripped plant life, and carved the mountains open beyond recognition.
TENFA follows these three women as they trek through scarred ancestral terrain, piecing together a vanishing oral tradition in order to save a life. Shot in an endangered language spoken by fewer than 60,000 people, with an all-Indigenous cast drawn from the director's own family and community, TENFA moves between emergency and elegy — a thriller structured like a folk song.