Welcome to watch our picks of Indigiqueer Shorts!  

This year we are honoring Queer Indigenous as Northern people of the year. Through the project we celebrate queer Indigenous art through several of the festival’s program parts, including film. We have chosen to rename one of our short film packages to Indigiqueer Shorts in honor of our LGBTQIA2S+ storytellings and directors.  

Enjoy these great short films, made by truly talented Indigiqueer directors!  

Full length: 42 minutes.  

Qulleq (Kalaallit Nunaat) 

I invite you to take three minute to just exist, to be present as I light my qulleq. Qulleq is a traditional oil lamp, that made it possible for our ancestors to keep fire inside a house made of snow. The qulleq made it possible to have light, heat and a place to cook and was essential for Inuit. 

Director: Aka Hansen 

Headdress (United States) 

A weekend at a music festival is brought to a grinding halt when Tai is confronted by a white person wearing a Native Ceremonial Headdress. He retreats into his mind where a roundtable of various versions of his identity meets to come up with the perfect thing to say.  

When the debate escalates into a fight, they break the only device to communicate messages to Tai. At this moment, the various versions of Tai have to band together to try and fix the damaged device and still come up with the “perfect thing to say.” 

Director: Taietsarón:sere 'Tai' Leclaire 

Janelle Niles: Inconvenient (Canada) 

Janelle Niles is a Black, Mi’kmaw, two-spirited woman from Sipekne’katik First Nation in Nova Scotia and a stand-up comedian. Despite a tumultuous upbringing, Janelle embraces her biracial experience and queer identity, using stand-up to usher in a new era of inclusive, Canadian comedy 

Director: Cass Gardiner 

Áhkuin (Sápmi) 

With the singular Sámi oral storytelling tradition of joik at its center, ÁHKUIN is a visual and musical call-and-response between a grandmother and her descendants. Archival interviews and the joik of Maarit-áhkku (dir. Sunná Máret Nousuniemi’s grandmother) unspool as a connective thread across time, inviting the viewer through a portal into this corner of Sápmi. Here, the rhythms of time are set by the daily tasks that assured the survival of those who came before; seemingly mundane chores — carrying water from the river, setting up the sauna, boiling reindeer bone marrow — offer up gifts of memory, music, and Indigenous knowledge. 
 
As in Indigenous communities the world over, colonization has profoundly shaped recent Sámi history through stories of loss. Drawing aesthetic inspiration from sources as diverse as duodji (Sámi handicrafts and land-based knowledge systems), the work of David Lynch, Pauliina Feodoroff’s Matriarkaatti (Matriarchy), and the environmentally focused, community-based art of Niillas Holmberg, Jenni Laiti and Outi Pieski, ÁHKUIN presents a melancholy yet playful Sámi story with lessons for a new era defined by giving and receiving. 

Directors: Radio-JusSunná / Sunná Nousuniemi and Guhtur Niillas Rita Duomis / Tuomas Kumpulainen