Pitch perfect

West Winnipeg

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/08/2023 (828 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Farrah Murdock won the 12th annual RBC Emerging Filmmaker Pitch Competition, which comes with a $10,000 prize, at the Gimli International Film Festival last month with her pitch for a short-film idea entitled Regalia.

The 23-year-old University of Winnipeg student, who should graduate with a film major and Indigenous studies minor in October, is a member of the Winnipeg Indigenous Filmmakers Council and has been interested in movie-making since high school, she said. She eventually found herself pursuing it in post-secondary education even after several phases of doubt.

“I was always interested in film, but I would always move away from it,” Murdock said. “There would be two weeks where I would be like, ‘Oh, maybe I should be a dentist, that’s probably what I’ll do,’ but then I’d be like ‘Well, I actually want to make movies,’ and that would always be my fallback.”

“It seemed so impossible, because I grew up on a reservation,” said the Peguis First Nation member. “It seemed like something I could never do because it was so far from where I was and I had no resources to chase it. So that’s why I needed to do university, that was my foot in the door.”

A course on Indigenous representation in film, taught by Darren Courchene, was what really narrowed down her interest, Murdock said.

“I realized, as an Anishinaabe person, I have a very specific voice — as an Anishinaabe woman, I have an even more specific voice that I could use, that I didn’t realize I had until I went to university. And then it just went from there.”

Regalia, which Murdock pitched live to competition judges on the morning of July 29 at the Gimli Film Festival, is a silent short film centred around a man, Leo, who goes about daily life in his Anishinaabe dance regalia.

When dancing, Leo is powerful and energetic, but at work and out in the street, his traditional wear is torn and dirtied. Slowly, he loses his regalia, but is inspired once more when he crosses paths with an older woman, dressed in a clean, traditional outfit. The film ends with Leo dressing in his bustle once more and returning to a powwow arbour to continue his original dance.

“When Anishinaabe people work or take up space in any industry, we have to fit ourselves into these western molds to even get through the door,” Murdock explained in her pitch introduction. “So when you see another Anishinabe person, there’s an unspoken acknowledgment and respect, (as well as) a mutual understanding of what it took to get there and what it takes to stay and just how important and precious it is for our presence to be in that space — in other words, we notice each others regalia.”

The idea for the story came from a pen sketch she saw in one of her classes — probably done over the course of five minutes, she said — depicting an Indigenous man in full regalia sitting languidly at his desk on a laptop. It struck a chord with her, eventually resulting in the pitch itself being written over the course of a day.

“I don’t write for plot, I just write about people existing, and I pair that with an environment, and whether the character accepts or rejects their environment. Or, like Regalia, whether the environment accepts or rejects the character, and then it kind of writes itself.”

Although Murdock doesn’t have any projects currently in development, her latest film, Unless You Have Been There, which centres around the experience of growing up on a reserve and wanting to leave, but not wanting to leave home, is currently starting to screen “here and there” through the Winnipeg Indigenous Filmmakers Collective, including a recent special screening at the Gimli festival.

Murdock credits the collective for its support throughout her film-making career so far.