Canadian Women Film Directors Database
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Loretta Todd (partial data)

Also known as: Loretta Sarah Todd
Country: Canada
Born: 1961

Films directed by Loretta Todd

Quotes by Loretta Todd

"I don't think I was ever an earnest social-documentary filmmaker. That wasn't what drove me. I always tried to make my work interpretive. I'm very present in my films. So even if I was making a documentary, I always left a place to express something of myself."
-- Loretta Todd (source)

"I guess I am sort of a classicist within my cultural context, within the cultural community of Aboriginal expression, where song and dance and story and creating were available to everybody to do, and there was no distinction between creating and everyday life. Still, there were certain people who were valued for their ability to have visions and to interpret dreams, who functioned as visionaries. Those people served a very central purpose in the community as being part of the continuum, being able to express certain principles by which we lived our life, such as our covenant with the Creator, like our relationship to other beings within the universe. I think what makes filmmakers great is the willingness to embrace that role of visionary and dreamer and to be able to interpret something back to the people."
-- Loretta Todd (source)

"With the 1960s and 1970s Canadian documentary I had grown up with, there was a lot of stationary camera work, and as a Native person, I felt that the camera was peering in at us—that the films offered a space that allowed people to laugh at us. You have to remember that when you grow up Native, you grow up with constant inspection—checking your hair for lice, welfare workers looking in on you, the dentist yanking your teeth out. It feels like you are constantly peered at, interrogated, under surveillance. I was conscious of wanting to deconstruct that, and camera movements were a way to do that."
-- Loretta Todd (source)

Quotes about Loretta Todd

"Loretta Todd's award-winning career has spanned an impressive range, from documentary videos for Native organizations to experimental art installations to feature documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada and feature film production. Her films address Aboriginal social memory, history, resistance, and cultural continuity in spite of colonization."
-- Kristin L. Dowell (source)

"By allowing Indigenous subjects to take center stage and address the audience directly, [Loretta] Todd gives voice to the voiceless. Their stories demonstrate the impact of history on identity and link the past to the present and the future."
-- Jennifer L. Gauthier (source)

"The racism [Loretta] Todd and her family experienced in Canada strengthened her resolve to always speak her mind and, as one of the few Aboriginal students in a formalist film school in Vancouver, to develop a solid commitment to her vision. She was intent on making films that were relevant to her life / the life of Aboriginal peoples, work that she could 'bring home' rather than mere art-for-art's-sake portraits of alienation."
-- Carol Kalafatic (source)

"A storyteller, imagemaker, activist, and theorist, [Loretta] Todd has created a rich, reflective, and uncompromising body of work. From her early experimental videos and installations through her groundbreaking documentaries of the 1990s to her feature-film-in-progress, she has demonstrated a clear and conscientious voice. Her films, videos, and essays offer a corrective to damaging stereotypes of Native peoples and cultures, and through her innovative, fluid mix of the 'dramatic' and the 'factual,' her work points towards a less-rigid filmmaking aesthetic."
-- Jason Silverman (source)

For QUOTES about a specific film by Loretta Todd, please see:   The Learning Path    Kainayssini Imanistaisiwa: The People Go On   

Notes about Loretta Todd

(sources)

Bibliography for Loretta Todd

Section 1: Publications about Loretta Todd

Book Chapters

Brief Sections of Books

Journal Articles

Web Sites

Section 2: Publications about the Films of Loretta Todd

The Learning Path (1991)

Book Chapters

Forgotten Warriors (1997)  (also known as: "Guerriers oubliés")

Brief Sections of Books

Archival Collections

These archival institutions have holdings related to Loretta Todd or her films:


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