Grace Dove makes directorial debut
Just when she thinks she’s going in one direction in her film and television career, she’s drawn to another.
Grace Dove, who grew up in Prince George, perhaps best known for her starring role opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the Oscar winning movie The Revenant, is now making her directorial debut with the poignantly beautiful and visually stunning short film Kiri and The Girl, available now on Apple TV.
The film just finished its festival run garnering placements at St. John’s International Women’s Festival, American Indian Film Festival SF, San Diego International Film Festival and Victoria Film Festival after debuting at the Vancouver International Film Fest last fall, and Dove said she’s so proud of the film.
“People always asked if I was going to become a director, suggested that I should start directing my own films and I always kind of laughed at the idea,” Dove said. “I didn’t think that was even an option.” She’s always been an actor and that is her chosen career or so she thought, she added.
“In acting there’s so much to learn,” Dove said. “And I knew this would be my craft for my entire life and so I never even considered moving on from acting but I’ve been doing this now for about a decade in Vancouver and I started to feel like we needed more Indigenous voices behind the camera and we needed more representation and proper representation so I think it kind of chose me and it was very apparent this was the right thing to do even though I never planned for it. It just felt like this was the time.”
Christopher Logan and Kiri Geen, two of the producers of the film Kiri and The Girl, reached out to Dove once the story was created and they had received a $100,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, Dove said.
“They were looking for an Indigenous female director because the film is about a young Indigenous girl and they knew that they needed that female perspective,” Dove said.
“It has helped me in my acting career as well because you just see how many moving pieces there are and how many people it takes to lift something like this off the ground,” Dove said. “It was so much work, so many hours, especially during the time of Covid and just hours and hours and hours of Zoom with all of these amazing people so dedicated to their craft and it was so much fun creating it.”