Indigenous female filmmaker honoured
Sonia Bonspille Boileau, a Mohawk filmmaker from Quebec, has won the Women in the Director’s Chair national WIDC Feature Film Award.
The prize includes cash and in-kind services valued at nearly $200,000 to help female directors get their feature films made.
Bonspille Boileau will use the award to complete Rustic Oracle, a drama about an 8-year-old Mohawk girl searching with her mother for her missing teenage sister, the WIDC said in a news release.
Her first feature was Le Dep in 2015, about a young Innu woman held at gunpoint in her father’s convenience store and the trauma that results. It screened at Toronto’s imagineNATIVE festival.
Bonspille Boileau also made a documentary about the 1990 Oka Crisis called The Oka Legacy and received the APTN Award of Distinction in 2016.
“To me this is much more than an award to help me make my film,” Bonspille Boileau said in a news release. “It’s an opportunity to be a part of the WIDC family; a community of women filmmakers and mentors I know I will be able to count on . . . I look forward to giving back the same kind of mentorship and support to others in the future.”
Meanwhile, another movie by an Indigenous female filmmaker was chosen as a Staff Pick Premiere by New York-based Vimeo. My Father’s Tools by Quebec’s Heather Condois the first Indigenous short chosen for the program, Vimeo said in a news release. It can be seen at Vimeo.com/ channels/Premieres. Debra Yeo