NANCY
In 1893, an Inuk baby named Nancy Columbia Palmer Eneutseak was born in a fake igloo at a human zoo at the Chicago World's Fair. Eighteen years later, Nancy wrote and starred in a silent film called "The Way of The Eskimo," becoming the first Indigenous screenwriter. No copies of this film have survived to the present day.
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Eva GrantDirectorForest Echoes
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Eva GrantWriterForest Echoes
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Yasmeen GrantProducerForest Echoes
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Eva GrantProducerForest Echoes
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Olivia Kate IatridisKey Cast"Nancy"Avatar: The Last Airbender
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Hunter Jack GrantDirector TraineeForest Echoes
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Yasmeen GrantProduction DesignerForest Echoes
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Project Type:Short
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Genres:Historical, Drama, Indigenous, Inuk
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Runtime:10 minutes
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Completion Date:April 15, 2026
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Country of Origin:Canada
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Country of Filming:Canada
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:Blackmagic Design URSA Mini Pro
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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Digital Cinema Package:Unavailable
A graduate of Stanford University, Eva Grant is an Indigenous-Eurasian mixed-media artist, curator, and filmmaker. She is a writer, director, editor, curator, digital artist, XR designer, composer, musician, photographer, podcaster, and public speaker, whose groundbreaking works have been featured across Canada, the US, and internationally. Eva is the recipient of the 2026 Emerging Digital Artist Award, and her virtual, VR, 2D and 3D digital art has been extensively exhibited at galleries and events across Canada
Eva is the founder of Tooth & Nail Pictures, an Indigenous, female-led media production company based on the Tsawout Reserve Lands of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Her interdisciplinary, interactive, immersive, narrative, and experimental media works interrogate time, technology, ecology, society, ethics, philosophy, justice, evolution, and transhumanism.
A Legal Observer certified by the National Lawyer's Guild, Eva has attended, documented, and de-escalated conflict between police and demonstrators at large-scale civil rights, climate justice, and human rights rallies in Canada and across the US, including Border Wall, the Muslim Travel Ban, BLM, Idle No More, and at several pipeline protests.
Her 2024 short film, "Forest Echoes", is based on her experience on the front lines of protest movements, and has screened at over 20 film festivals in Canada, the US, and Internationally This film accompanies her to speaking engagements on Aboriginal youth justice, where it serves as an educational resource for law enforcement, social workers, and advocates.
Other credits include: writing and co-producing CBC’s radio adaption of the acclaimed graphic novel anthology "This Place: 150 Years Retold"; associate-producing Madison Thomas’ Emmy-winning Buffy Sainte-Marie documentary; and a 5-episode directing block on TFO/Lopii Productions’ series Couleurs du Nord.
Eva has also programmed for the 2023 Vancouver Queer Film Festival, the 2024 and 2025 Pacific Rim Short Film Festivals, and has curated a number of group exhibitions, including as guest curator for Debaser and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective.
Eva has a full slate of projects in development, including several feature films, a children's series, an animated series, an experimental music album, documentaries, podcasts, stage plays, and a number of XR, gaming, and coding projects. Her work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Sundance Institute, the Canada Media Fund, Creative BC, Vancouver Film Studios, the First People's Cultural Council, the Cinevic Society of Independent Filmmakers, and the BC Arts Council.
Eva’s previous credits include: writing and co-producing CBC’s radio adaption of the acclaimed graphic novel anthology "This Place: 150 Years Retold"; associate-producing Madison Thomas’ Emmy-winning Buffy Sainte-Marie documentary; and a 5-episode directing block on TFO/Lopii Productions’ series Couleurs du Nord.
Eva has programmed for the 2023 Vancouver Queer Film Festival, the 2024 and 2025 Pacific Rim Short Film Festivals, and has curated a number of group exhibitions, including as guest curator for Debaser and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective.
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Yasmeen Grant is a Eurasian-Canadian lawyer, entrepreneur, curator, traditional knowledge keeper, and interdisciplinary artist. Her background as a writer and theorist informs her approach to culture, post-humanism, ethics, sociology, ontology, quantum reckoning, epistemology, emergent technology, and radical jurisprudence.
Yasmeen is a graduate of the United World College of South East Asia, McGill University, and the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Law. She is fluent in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and has worked as an advocate and interpreter for Indigenous groups seeking to protect traditional knowledge and ecosystems worldwide. In 2008 she co-produced a two-part documentary for CBC Radio Ideas, entitled In Search of the Divine Vegetal, which focused on plant medicines of the Amazon and Andes. In researching this program, Yasmeen traveled to South America on numerous occasions to conduct and translate dozens of interviews with tribal elders and healers from across the continent.
Yasmeen serves as creative producer for Tooth & Nail Pictures, where she oversees organizational systems, cultivates artistic vision, and weaves Indigenous ontologies, relational knowledge, and decolonial perspectives into conventional narratives. Braiding themes of Indigenous futurism, experimental storytelling, and speculative philosophy. She is also the team's co-lead creative, editor, storyboard artist, slate developer, production manager story editor, script supervisor, production designer, curator, and sound designer.
Yasmeen’s projects have been supported by the National Film Board, imagineNATIVE, The First People's Cultural Council, Vancouver Film Studios, The Canada Media Fund, the Indigenous Screen Office, Creative BC, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the BC Arts Council.
NANCY is a bold, colourful, and low-impact period piece with a short runtime, few characters, one location, and much of the story alluded to rather than depicted directly. It is a bittersweet and cinematic story that honours the unsung Indigenous pioneers in film, and serves as a love letter to Indigenous cinema in its many iterations and evolutions. The film tells only part of the incredible but largely-obscured tale of Nancy Columbia Eneutseak, an Inuk woman born in an “Eskimo Village” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair who went on, at the tender age of 18, to become one of the first and youngest filmmakers of all time. Sadly, her films have been lost to time, as has much of her life story.
Since no known copies of The Way of the Eskimo remain, we are not able to view or accurately recreate the contents of her film, nor would I have wanted to, given the racist era in which it was produced. I therefore sought to reinterpret and humanize Nancy as an Indigenous woman and artist by focusing on her joy, pride, and hope for the future. By excavating, archiving, and narrativizing a “lost” history, NANCY flips the script on the conventional subject/viewer relationship. She is, as in The Way of the Eskimo, both the author and the subject of her own experiences.
In some ways similar to the final scene of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and the continuous-take scenes in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, NANCY relies on long takes for half the film. The other half is a static meditation on the filmmaker’s reaction upon finding herself alone in a theatre, seeing her own movie on the big screen for the very first time, before audience members arrive to attend the premiere.
With all the current interest around Indigenous people and the history of cinema, such as Lily Gladstone’s historic Oscar campaign for the period drama Killers of the Flower Moon, and recently-restored footage taken by Thomas Edison of Sioux Dancers in 1895, NANCY relocates one of the original Indigenous filmmakers in our historical archive. The purpose of this film is to “reclaim” the lost footage by situating it as a spiritual successor to Nancy’s own films, and to position her unequivocally within the context of cinema, one of the few places where we are observer, not observed.
NANCY creates a platform for Inuk representation and cross-Indigenous collaboration by centring and engaging the Inuit community, including consultation with an Inuk cultural advisor, traditional clothing fashioned by community members, music licensed from Indigenous artists, and an Indigenous lead. Once the film completes its festival run, my goal is to confer the rights to the film to Nancy’s home community of Nain, Labrador, so they, too, can reclaim one of their own, and regain some record of her groundbreaking achievements.
