Asinabka Film & Media Arts Festival
Celebrating Indigenous Arts in Algonquin Territory
Ottawa • Canada • Aug. 9-13, 2023
Asinabka Festival is a registered non-profit organization, and was first organized by an ad-hoc collective of Indigenous artists and arts professionals who came together in 2012 to launch the first edition of the festival. We began this project out of a strong need for a space in Ottawa to showcase film, video, and media arts created by Indigenous peoples. Our curatorial focus is to centre the programming of work by Indigenous peoples, as well as the work of local artists, and emerging artists.
The mandate of the Asinabka Festival is to hold an annual Indigenous film and media arts festival in Ottawa, Canada, that allows independent artists, national, international, Indigenous, and non-Indigenous, to share, present, and disseminate their work. In addition to the annual festival, Asinabka Festival offers year round programming, such as one-time film screenings and art events, as well as our annual winter "Snow-screening" in an outdoor theatre made of snow.
The Asinabka Festival's goals are:
• to highlight works that examine Indigenous issues and topics
• to support media artists and filmmakers
• to promote Indigenous cultures and languages
• to educate people about First Nations, Métis, and Inuit issues in Canada, and about Indigenous issues internationally
• to provide a space where Indigenous peoples can tell their own stories and see their own cultures reflected back at them
• to entertain, to be innovative, and to present the best in Indigenous film and arts.
Asinabka Festival is non-competitive and does not offer any Awards or Prizes, although we do offer Screening Fee's for all films presented at our festival. Artist fees are determined by following IMAA guidelines. Asinabka Festival is mostly volunteer-run, and does not charge submission fees for artists (with the exception of the $1 charge through FilmFreeway to limit the high volume of ineligible submissions). Please contact us via email if you would like to have this $1 fee waived for your eligible submission.
