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
- Born in Edmonton.
- Cree Métis director, producer, and screenwriter.
- Studied film at Simon Fraser University.
(sources)
Bibliography for
Loretta
Todd
Section 1: Publications about Loretta Todd
Book Chapters
-
Bjornson, Michelle. "Making Documentary Films: Panel Discussion with Nicole Giguère, Brenda
Longfellow, Loretta Todd, and Aerlyn Weissman."
In Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, edited by Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, and Valerie Raoul, 208-216. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003.
-
Gauthier, Jennifer L. "Dismantling the Master's House: The Feminist Fourth Cinema Documentaries of Alanis Obomsawin and Loretta Todd."
["This article has been reprinted with the permission of Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities [...] 29.3 (Summer 2010)."]
In Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, and Theory, edited by Eric L. Buffalohead and M. Elise Marubbio, 89-115. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013.
-
Kalafatic, Carol. "Keepers of the Power: Story as Covenant in the Films of Loretta Todd, Shelley Niro, and Christine Welsh."
In Gendering the Nation: Canadian
Women's Cinema, edited by Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault, 109-119. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
-
Silverman, Jason. "Uncommon Visions: The Films of Loretta Todd."
In North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 1980, edited by William Beard and Jerry White, 376-389. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002.
Brief Sections of Books
-
Dowell, Kristin L. Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
(pp. 134-136, 147-151)
-
Eisner, Ken. "Shadow and Light: First Nations Women Filmmakers."
In Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, edited by Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, and Valerie Raoul. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003.
(pp. 394-396)
Journal Articles
-
Gauthier, Jennifer L. "Dismantling the Master's House: The Feminist Fourth Cinema Documentaries of Alanis Obomsawin and Loretta Todd." Post Script 29, no. 3 (2010): 27.
Web Sites
Section 2: Publications about the Films of Loretta Todd
Book Chapters
-
Bredin, Marian. "The Learning Path."
In The Cinema of Canada, edited by Jerry White, 152-161. London: Wallflower, 2006.
Forgotten Warriors
(1997) (also known as:
"Guerriers oubliés")
Brief Sections of Books
-
Adah, Anthony. "On the Field of Battle: First Nations Women Documentary Filmmakers."
In The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers, edited by Brenda Austin-Smith and George Melnyk. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010.
(pp. 176-181)
Archival Collections
These archival institutions have holdings related to Loretta Todd or her films:
