ZACHARY GOLDKIND ON THEIR FILM 'A SAD SAD GHOST PICKING AT THE HAIRS OF THEIR KNUCKLES'
Zachary Goldkind is an experimental-narrative filmmaker & programmer, and teacher based in Tkaronto, a part of Turtle Island. This land, under colonial contexts, has come to be known as Toronto, Canada. Zac holds an MFA in Film Production from York University. Their studies orbit subjects of aesthetic theory, image-ideology, and narrative theory; their primary focus regards the implementation of marxist analyses in confronting the heterogeneity of formalism, invoking affect theory, linguistics, and semiotic/semantic considerations throughout. Collaborating and engaging with artists and local filmmakers, Zachary’s intention is to help organize networks engaging in support through a critical reprogramming, which places agency in artists’ hands. Zachary seeks forums wherein artists can gather to express visions of futurity which would place their labour and respect before all else. Through this, their objective is one that enables the ignition of an earnest dialogue between filmmaker and spectator, filmmaker and curator, and filmmaker and filmmaker; this accomplished by means of the work they platform, the workshops/seminars they host, and, of course, their own projects.
Interview by Rebeccah Love
Can you describe your childhood? What kinds of creative activities did you most enjoy?
My childhood was rather isolated, both within the general Ashkenazi community that represented the majority population of my private Jewish education (this was my social life), as well as the curated extracurricular activities that my father would organize for me (this was my personal life). My friends were mostly into sports and so I sought out that same expression of identity. I played basketball, hockey, football, and baseball. What would always occur, however, is that my father would take on the responsibilities of coach. He was, and remains, a hard man, who believes firmly in the strictness of authority. This had been, in a concentrated form, projected onto me during these team sports. Eventually - under such pressure and a constant surveilling gaze - I quit, myself no longer enjoying the activities, alongside a realization that I wasn’t very long for these games, regardless (I was a bad player, I still lack hand-eye coordination). I remember my first theatrical experience at the age of 4: Fellowship of the Ring. My aunt had studied film during her undergrad and saw my interest, so she helped, alongside my grandparents, cultivate a hobby in the cinema. I’d be in a theatre through my youth at least once every two weeks. Often, each trip to the movies would consist of a double feature: my Bubbie and Zayde paying for us to see one film, then expertly sneaking into another afterwards. Every Friday, my aunt and I would rent three films from Rogers Video and marathon them. This is how I found my way to film. I also played chess, and I was pretty good at it too, but support for that hobby waned as my parents divorce encroached. I still play, though now I’m mostly interested in Mahjong, and will at some point in the near future try to seriously reconvene with the game.
How would you describe your teenage years? How did you spend your free time?
Film, film, film. I had become a giant nerd by the time I hit 13 years of age, having internalized the machinations of 2001, Magnolia, and The Dark Knight. By middle school, I was the “film kid,” and in high school I attended an arts specific program at Earl Haig, the Claude Watson school for the Arts, where I was given the opportunity to investigate my interests in the cinema through production. I made horrible short films, some decent saccharine works, and a few very funny genre romps. On my time-gaps, which were mostly during the morning periods in the latter half of high school, I’d purposefully make my way early, set up in the student council office, and watch films until my classes began. I remember peers walking in on me during the marathon of Bergman I had going through the weeks. I remember imploring everyone to watch Persona because I couldn’t understand it at the time and wanted people to engage with. It was all very funny and earnest and deeply nerdy. I’m still a huge nerd, I love that part about me and how embracing it with sincerity has offered me both a confidence and kindness in how I wish to share this love. These high school years were generally peaceful, only ever burdened by my parent’s divorce, which I will admit caused much strife and emotional scrambling. That time, that process, it recreated my relationships with them and, unfortunately, those relationships ossified. I’ve been contending with it since. I was at a movie theatre at least once a week. I hadn’t really much more dimension to my interests until I got passionate about politics. My mother was and still is worried I don’t have too many interests, but I’m happy and proud of the time I’ve committed to learning about what I love and providing myself with such a wealth of knowledge.
What art did you gravitate towards in your youth? (Books, music, movies..)
I was a book lover, finding and reading as much youth material as I could. My Zayde, very early on, established in me his affinity for collecting, and so I used this proclivity as an excuse to read, read, read. Collections of books mounted. And I should say these weren’t good books. Lots of Dav Pilkey and the like. Grade 6 is where I pivoted to classic lit, my English teacher at the time insisting I read To Kill a Mockingbird and its genus outside of class time. She also told me to start writing. So that’s what I did: I went to the cinema at least bi-weekly (this was before high school, when it would be weekly), read every other night, and found time in-between those rituals and general socializing to write. I would write pulp. Bad riffs on my favourite procedural television shows. I recall the first stories I ever wrote were titled, “The Adventures of Quintin and Tino.” They were adventure, crime stories. Brother detectives solving cases often perpetrated by supervillain-types. It was all very absurd and spectacle based. I also remember the first time someone (my mother) addressed that these titular characters sound a lot like that director I was obsessed with. Having not realized it, the sudden epiphany stunted my desire to continue with these short stories (at the time of the discovery, I was 21k words into a novelization of their excursions). I’m still unsure why this small observation made me want to quit writing these stories. Perhaps this was a time when I was terrified of not being “original,” and this detail compounded into an anxiety that I was fraudulent, subconsciously. I recall it was almost a fear-induced resignation. Kind of ridiculous, but I was 14 and lacked any social confidence. I saw it as a social failure, that I was merely aping, but it was all probably a lot less delineated back then. I was probably just scared I didn’t have completely “original” ideas. Following this, I refocused my creative output to screenwriting. (I still have a manuscript of the unfinished novel. It’s awful. Ten thousand words in, it just becomes a Saw film.) High School saw me writing at least two bad short screenplays a month. I was a monster, coming up with so many high concept ideas that waxed intro-to philosophy existentialism. A lot of films about death. I think I was able to shirk most of the suicidal ideation that had been so prevalent in middle school with this outlet, writing fiction about how, in a manifold of ways, I might be able to confront death on my own terms. Bad scripts, bad ideas, but all very funny in retrospect.
What high school classes did you enjoy the most? Did you have any standout teachers?
My English literature class, my creative writing class, and, of course, my film classes, were the highlights of high school. English lit provided me with an expansion on the curiosity I had already been cultivating from middle school. Creative Writing gave me reaffirmation on the stylings I was interested in exploring, which have honestly only kept up on an increasingly abstracted trajectory since. The film courses taught me the fundamentals I still carry and develop atop of. In grade 12, the big assignment was for the entire class to produce a 30min short film. The teacher would pick two producers, the class would vote on a screenplay, the producers/writer/teacher would interview for director, they would all then interview for cinematographers, and following this each remaining student would find a role within what was left: Art Director, Editor, Gaffer, First AD, etc.. I managed to get the Director’s role and our year-long process of creation, its collaborative and often tumultuous procedures, were the most rewarding experiences I had in formal education prior to post-secondary.
The teachers I remember having an impact on me were throughout my primary education. Mrs. Goldstein, whose first name I believe is Bernice, was my grade 6 English teacher who told me to start creative writing. She was a hard ass, but I had so much respect for her because she was also very kind through her method of uplifting. It was a kind of guidance I never really had, one that took notice of my expression, not just my interests, and sought to help enrich that. In high school, Walter Raemisch was a tech teacher I had for a few years who really provided an excellent base atop which we could all truly experiment. His assignments were so beautifully thought out and open to interpretation. The assignment which culminated in my favorite film from high school was one where we were provided with a grocery list and our task was to create a stop motion character piece about whomever would write our respective lists. For a kid in grade 11, this is the kind of stuff that gets you thinking and imagining! Victoria Dawe, who sadly passed last year, was also a great inspiration. She was a stickler but would never put you down. She was a main figure in helping me access those interests in dramaturgy. Phil Hoffman would be the next professor to make an impact, but that wasn’t until the end of my undergrad.
What route did you take after graduating from high school? What were the big questions that fascinated you the most, going into adulthood?
My father had been fairly pointed in telling me I couldn’t study film after high school, at least not as a major. Accounting or general business with a minor in film studies - this was what I believed to be my future. At the university conference, down at the Convention centre, we are walking through the arts programmes and I get into a conversation with a screenwriting professor at York. He, Howard Wiseman, informs me of the specialized screenwriting program - the only one in the country at the time - and through our dialogue he convinces me to apply. After some lengthy conversations, my dad concedes his ground and I’m able to apply solely for film programs. In earnest, I saw myself as a screenwriter, ready to lunge into an industrial mindset, for I had only known industrial aspiration. I wanted an Oscar and had already believed I knew how to get one. The questions I had been asking myself going into post-secondary education would all eventually fall away and be replaced with the questions I’m still asking myself now, questions I really only began teasing myself with in the 4th year of my undergrad, when industrialist mentalities were increasingly sickening to me and I didn’t know where to go. The pandemic would give me the time and space to realize myself, or, at least, realize what line to follow in order to begin that new process I find myself within contemporarily.
What kinds of filmmakers have you enjoyed the most in your adult life?
I am a materialist through and through. In that, structural filmmakers and filmmakers whose intrigues into the complex that is humanity then configure towards the political make-up of their life - these are who I grew to adore. Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz, Straub/Huillet, Michael Snow, Abbas Kiarostami, Theo Angelopolous, Tsai Ming-liang, Chantal Akerman, Antonioni, Godard, Mani Kaul, Akio Jissoji, Mamoru Oshii, Nagisa Oshima, Tarkovsky, Wiseman, Denis, Yang, Rivette, Tarr, Sara Gomez, Eisenstein, Duras… While I adore Experimental film, the writer inside me always veers towards narrative and the capacities it has for experimentation. Hence, the filmmakers above. I would also include Rose Lowder, Elizabeth Price, Ben Russell, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Conner, Chris Gallagher, Teo Hernandez, Takashi Ito, Brakhage, Wieland, Jim Davis, and most importantly, Robert Beavers, whose formalism is the most singular utility of the image I’ve ever witnessed. If only I’m able to see more of his, he would become my favourite filmmaker. I want films where the image and/or montage is doing most of, if not all, the heavy lifting. I’ve become quite dogmatic about that and quite dogmatic about the political faculties of the image as a responsibility the filmmaker must take on. Much of my criticism is likely to read as narrow-minded, prescriptive even, but I seek through it the capacity to build an ideology within and without my life. I am a marxist and so I want to understand what that means to me as I approach a medium I’ve known longer than that politic. Historical materialist analysis has given me my articulation of admirations and ideals. I’m in the midst of seeking out those who have truly reimagined narrative structures. If you know of any, or have any ideas, please do let me know!
Can you talk about 'A Sad, Sad Ghost Picking at the Hairs of Their Knuckles'?' What is this film all about? What questions are you exploring in this work?
Knuckles, for me, has three distinct layers. We, or I, find these layers gradually transitioning through one another from beginning to end. It was actually a surprise to myself as the edit went along that I was able to discern this subliminal arc which delineated the concepts I had both entered into the project with, as well as found through its development. Each layer has its own thematic nucleus, discursive of the last. This is to say, again for me, that the film is about three things: three intentionally conceived core expressions. But, these ideas and articulations are primarily for me and me alone. That’s not to say I’ve made it totally and pompously inaccessible, or that I don’t wish for anyone to glean the ideas present, but I do believe that illegibility is an important element of text to utilize within our neoliberalized sphere. It’s so often when these ideas, as it relates to my identity, become a commodity for onlookers, immediacy for strangers who cannot possibly grasp the complex of internalized perceptions and combatting expressions that coexist in me. I do not wish to be itemized and speak (or address) explicitly my concerns for myself. That is a process I’m going through, that’s between myself and those I choose to share it with. How audiences read the film, that will be their own experience to have, their own ideas to conjure within and without the processes they distinctly move through. I look forward to discussing what those experiences might be and, perhaps, open up to those willing to engage earnestly with me.
The work is very purposefully obtuse, its narrative structure lacking in both plotted and temporal continuity. This is deliberate, of course, for I hope that through this film I can begin a larger project of mine: wherein I experiment and explore, I search for and imagine narrative constructs that I have yet to see represented on screen. You ask about what I’m exploring, and, in earnest, most of that exploration is a pedagogical inquiry for myself. My art, it must be defined, is part and parcel with my role as teacher. My art reflects the ideological proficiencies I continue to ascertain, whilst my pedagogy reflects the artistic analysis and introspection I go through with each new project. It is a dual creation: art and knowledge, both of which can be interlaced (which they inherently are) and isolated dependent on contexts of dissemination. For audiences, I hope they might address the film with curiosity and reflexivity. I want them to ask questions about the experiential faculties of the work, the oblique aesthetic excursions, the manners in which they read an image and how the following image changes their perception of the last. Visual storytelling, a trite phrase I know, but I am interested truly in only utilizing the image to relate narrativity, all the while those images are imbued with a technical ambition as to manifest specific affects. In essence, I wish for audiences to confront this narrative implied only through the affect.
Supplementing the film, there is a fairly large paper I’ve written to provide context. I do not mention the film in this paper as I only really regard the ideology, the theory, and the world into which I made this film (I only briefly bring the film into conversation at one moment in the paper’s second part). The paper is freely accessible and everyone who attends the film’s screening will get a copy of it. The paper comes with screening links to the film, some playful screening “instructions,” and is made up of a collection of manifestos and reflections, providing anyone and everyone willing to engage in this curated experience I’ve concocted a frame to approach the work with. I’m tired of films existing in the limbo of commercial exhibition strategies, which film festivals have resoundingly become a part of. I’m interested in self-distribution through unorthodox channels, inviting whoever wants to come along on the journey. Ensuring a film, as an expression of my life, my political and philosophical and aesthetic fascinations, is provided proper and continual context is important to me. Perhaps, I hope, by my fourth or fifth feature, I’d have cultivated enough of a reputation that this self-distribution strategy becomes one where I don’t feel like I’m shouting into a cavern. I’ve emailed multiple independent film publications to see if there would be any interest in covering this project and process, but I’ve received absolutely no response (those who responded simply said that this wasn’t something for them, which I can respect). It’s a bit disheartening, that these spaces seeking to cultivate discourse and visibility of indie cinema won’t respond to an independent artist, not even with a polite rejection, which at least provides some semblance of humility to the submitter. This is the larger issue I also have with the festival submission process. It’s all a part of this depersonalization that an industrial hegemony reaffirms again and again. See, I wish not to make money from my art - money will come through other jobs, teaching ideally - I only wish to share the work, my ideas, my ideology, and engage in discourse. I am not here to monetize these films, my personal expressions of abstracted emotionalities and anxieties. I wish not to commodify this work. I only wish to share it. So, perhaps one day, I’m hopeful that the community I’m throwing these ideas out towards will respond with that curiosity I know we all wish to engage with, but one that truly needs to be deprogrammed of its qualitative assumptions of non-industrial alignment. Film festivals are not the only route that worthwhile experiments in this art are channeled through, and we need to learn that and find ways to create open and accessible space where these works can exist.
How did you first develop an interest in filmmaking?
I remember being in the car with my father, either near the end of grade 7 or the beginning of 8… maybe it was in the summer between the two years. I had seen a pamphlet lying in the front cup holder for the Claude Watson arts program. I asked about it and learned my parents were seeking out secondary schools for my sister, where she might be able to practice in one of the arts she has been engaged in through her youth, which were singing and dance. That was the divide we had early on: my sister was the artist, I the “athlete,” but that soon shifted. Now she’s in an LSAT course applying to law school and I’ve just finished a masters in film production (Knuckles, by the way, is my master’s thesis project). Anyways, I pick up this pamphlet and my eyes follow the broad tableaux images down the page: MUSIC, DANCE, VISUAL ART, DRAMA, and then at the bottom it says “screen arts.” I’m wondering what the hell that means, but someone is posing with a chunky Sony camcorder, so I just assume that this might be filmmaking. It was literally at that moment, when I had simply believed my fate was to be enrolled in CHAT, the Jewish high school, where I decided I was going to try filmmaking. I knew I loved the movies. I knew I was watching movies no one around me had heard of, but of course I was soon to discover that movies are made outside of America and that, in fact, most of them are made outside of America. But it was really this one moment where the whole trajectory of everything must have completely shifted. I asked my parents and they said, “oh… okay, yeah, that makes sense.” I auditioned for the school and got in and those four years became, as I said before, foundational.
It wasn’t until my fourth year of undergrad where that whole trajectory shifted again. I had been growing tired of the screenwriting regimen. We weren’t being taught how to foster our own voices, only how we can mould into the accepted systemics of narrativity in AmeriCanada. Individuality was about the ideas you can fit into three acts, not HOW you configure narrative with the ideas you have to work with. It was really frustrating. I’d bring a film with as genius and renowned a screenplay as L’Avventura to my professors and they’d never heard of it. They’d watch and ask me what it was about the work that moved me, and the questions I’d have about finding new space for adapting the ideas percolating in my head were never answered. I wasn’t sure how to keep going, the frustration became palpable. In comes Phil Hoffman, a friend and mentor (and eventually my Master’s Supervisor), who allowed me into his experimental film class after expressing fatigue with screenwriting. I knew I wasn’t technically allowed to be in a production class but I fought my way in, regardless. I wasn’t going to leave my undergrad inundated with disappointment. His class offered me the chance to engage directly with my admiration of structural cinema and it's in his class I made two of the first works I’m quite proud of. I knew I was going to continue filmmaking after having gone through the productions of these class projects. I was invigorated and every time I make a new film, that’s the feeling I get, and the excitement only amplifies with each new work. I couldn’t clearly articulate, if I tried, the elation I feel when a new idea comes to me and sits just right, stews, and takes over my imagination. It’s definitely a kind of high, but one that offers me an opportunity for a real incisive criticality. It’s moments like this, which extend to my very facilitated experiences on set - set ethics are integral for me, I refuse to make a film without established ethical codes that everyone who will be a part of production understands and has the chance to respond to - where the reasons behind me continuing to make films can be found.
Do you find Toronto to be an artist-friendly city?
Toronto is a cultural hub, a city vibrating with expression and community spaces wherein that expression thrives. Unfortunately, I’m a bit awkward socially and haven’t really been able to create the network of artist friends I’ve wanted to. I think I’m a bit too austere and materialist and maybe too one-track minded in my politic-first approach to creation, I don’t know. I know of filmmakers who have their networks of friends, of supporters who are simultaneously engaged in this world of art making, but I haven’t really been able to branch out of the network I established during my undergrad. My masters was during lockdown and so the lack of proximity to my cohort was really felt. I’m trying though, I guess trying to make friends and build relationships, though I also psych myself out quite a bit in this regard. I keep wanting to find other Marxist filmmakers who are curious about the desires I’ve been orbiting, around modes of production where every step of the process is autonomous, where we rebuke our reliance on institutionalization. I haven’t quite found those people yet, because I also know it’s hard for an artist to say, “hey, I don’t want to make money doing my art because if I do I need to align myself with these spaces in the context of my creation.” I always go back to Marx’s quote, “In the future there will be no painters, only men who, among other things, also like to paint.” I might be paraphrasing a bit, but that’s the gist. It’s the most resoundingly impactful image of futurity I’ve ever come across and I want to engage with artists who might also find resonance in this.
Toronto is a city increasingly collapsing, but this isn’t specific. The film world is on the brink of a seismic shift because the economy behind it isn’t sustainable. Simply, Toronto is not as friendly to artists, as other cities might be, because of its inhospitable economy, which is a fact that everyone in the city is facing, not just artists. We have the luck to belong to a network of co-ops that can help the small artist exist in a public sphere where there are active ways to practice one’s work, which I know many cities across the country aren’t as privileged to have, or perhaps they only have one central hub that everyone is moving in and out of (which, frankly, might be the best solution to community building - Toronto is a bit fractured, but I mostly blame that on its proximity to industry and how that pervades a lot of our smaller spaces. Aspiration, especially when it’s so close, will eat you the fuck up. It took me a long time and a lot of parsing through negativity to finally affirm myself and my rejection of our professional models.). Toronto is the city I know, it’s the city I understand how to maneuver, but I am still learning, still seeking new relationships, new contexts into which I can flourish alongside others.
Why is art and filmmaking important?
My answer to the importance of art or filmmaking might be a bit reductive, because I haven’t yet been able to convince myself that they are. Images are important. Images are the most utilized form of communication in the world. Visual literacy is important then, and filmmaking can proffer tools to challenge the hegemony of contemporary visual literacy. So, in that manner, filmmaking and, by extension, art is important. It shapes culture, it provides context and gives material shape to ideals, philosophy, ethics, moralism, politik. A lot of art tends towards idealist, unserious (in my opinion) fascinations and I frankly don’t care about the spiritual qualities it might evoke; the metaphysics of art are, to me, arbitrary and futile. Film is so much more difficult, too, as - and a friend of mine just flat out stated this, which is a sentiment I agree with - film is more suited for mass aestheticism, for reaffirming power rather than breaking it down. The most legible images are those that reconstitute Hollywood’s fascism and because so many people learn how to speak in images through that hegemony, their stories of marginality become reified into these fascistic structures. The disenfranchised voice so often falls into the enunciation of the oppressor. With this idea, filmmaking’s importance becomes nebulous and it's in this insidious quality where it’s the responsibility of any left-leaning artist to intervene in these imaged histories and reimagine how an image can articulate your displaced positionality. Art is important in that it has the capacity for this, but it is also so dangerous because the education and so much of the philosophy around art fails to acknowledge the ideological substrata our forms are branded with. So, yeah… I guess I’m just very ambivalent about this question, because I do not wish to idealize art, for I absolutely do not see importance - in fact, I’d argue it’s detrimental - if I concern myself with the manners and contexts in which we most often engage with art. Art as commodity to be consumed, essentially, rather than as work to debate over and necessarily, I believe, struggle with.
Which artists in your own community do you admire?
I’ve come to a place where admiration is difficult, because I don’t really see anyone doing the work I want to be doing. I don’t really see anyone in Toronto trying to make feature films with a 5k grant from the city’s arts council. I don’t really see artists rejecting the homogenizing institutions we are surrounded by, speaking up against their malpractices and contradictions. I see a lot of people engaging in these micro-cinema programmes, and it’s absolutely on me that I haven’t really been engaging with the communities who gather there, so I don’t know what those who are present aspire towards. I know a few of the artists whose work has shown in these spaces and I know they seek industrial success, so I do the bad thing and make blanket assumptions. If you haven’t noticed, I have a lot of reactive arrogance I still need to work through. I'm quite distrustful and so I’m not really giving people the benefit of the doubt. This is wrong of me. I’m likely just not searching hard enough for the artists who are there to critically engage with their forms and how those forms are in dialogue with the politics of local public spheres - I know there must be others, I’m certainly not special.
What are you looking forward to?
I’m going to assume that this is more of a broad reaching question, which I’m thankful for after this investigation into my past! I’m looking forward to going on vacation for the first time since 2016. I’m looking forward to the screening of my film, to the responses it will get. I’m looking forward to this next year, the first teaching opportunities I’ve found for myself and laying low after having just quit my job. I’m looking forward to the process of applying for a PhD and eventually writing a book about production methodology and the matrix of concerns one should approach as a part of that generative process. I’m looking forward to reading, to having time to jump back into theory after not really having space to focus post-masters. Working on yourself is really fucking hard and I’m intensely privileged that I have the resources and ability to not need to be working incessantly, that I have the ability to spend a year working 3-4 different gig jobs that compile a minimum earning to drift atop of as I seek work rooted more in that community building I had discussed. I’m looking forward to writing out some grant applications for two feature films I wish to make soon, one for 5k and one for 10k. But, teaching… yeah, teaching is what I’m most excited about. I’ll be hosting some workshops at Charles Street Video in July and August and hopefully return for more the following months. I’ve also got something really wonderful being cooked up with LIFT that I’m excited to share. Oh, also, and this should be obvious, I’m looking forward to officially sharing my film with the world. Putting it out into the public mid-August, hoping that there are folks out there who are intrigued, curious, and want to engage with the work in its many parts. I’ve had some conversations with people who didn’t like the film at all and didn’t know how to access it or found flaws in the lacking connective tissue between the images. It’s been really beautiful and rewarding having these dialogues. I’ve had responses that have created entirely new meanings of the work, and responses that receive the film as a tone poem meant to be watched at 2am, where the night creeps in and fatigue provokes phantasms. And I’ve had responses that see the work as an experiment in spectator positionality, as well as my intended narrative provocation. I’m looking forward to more of that, more of people willing to be forthright with the artist. I wish there was more space to be honest about why we dislike things, even why we like them, but where the response isn’t an artist listening, it’s them actively creating and facilitating discourse. In that, I think you then know they’re not just doing this for themselves.
6:30pm, August 25th, 2023 - come to Innis Town Hall for a screening of Zachary Goldkind's directorial feature debut, a three hour durational fiction. Afterwards, everyone is welcome to follow the filmmaker and present crew to a nearby bar for conversation and community building! The screening is completely free to attend and open to all, but small donations are being taken. Donations go towards recouping rental fees for the venue. All money made after this recoupment will be donated to the ImagineNative Film Festival. Reserve your spot here: