REEL YOUTH | VOICES of the LAND films

Reel Youth is proud to present nine new films from the VOICES of the LAND Filmmaking Program, a flagship collaboration between EBus Academy and Reel Youth.

VOICES of the LAND brings high school students together to learn about the Indigenous cultures, traditional practices, and ecological knowledge of land that they have a deep relationship with. The program invites reflection on participants’ own roles as stewards or guests and encourages a decolonizing approach to understanding land rights, land tenure, dispossession, and ongoing efforts to reclaim sovereignty.

In this program high school students from diverse backgrounds used the lens of filmmaking to reflect on the theme of Reconciliation as experienced through the places they most love to be. Participants chose land they have feel intimately connected to, then researched the Indigenous histories and present realities of these lands and territories including relationships to land, stewardship, self-determination, oral histories, missing perspectives, and the ongoing impacts of colonization. In the program students listened to Indigenous poetry of poets own relationships to land and colonization, considered the idea of land ownership VS belonging, listened to a retelling the story of the beginning of the numbered treaty negotiations from a Nehithaw Grandfather who was there, learned the fundamentals of filmmaking, researched, walked the land, wrote free-writes, composed poetry, then went out into the places in nature and learned to listen and observe it from a different perspective.

We invite you to watch these films, created with care and thoughtfulness, as part of a shared journey toward deeper understanding, respect, and reconciliation. These films are an embodied response to what the students learned and how they relate with the land and hopefully a step in many toward a deeper understanding of active, living, ongoing, embodied reconcilliation with the nations whose territory on which they live.

In our work we strive to embody what we hope to see in the world—a just humanity and
community in which people are free to be themselves fully and without fear. A community where no one is exiled or silenced because of gender, gender expression, race, color, ethnic or national origin, religion, sexual/affectional orientation, age, class, physical character or disability. We believe in the power of storytelling to make connections across difference.