Emerging Indigenous Filmmakers Hone Their Craft at Santa Fe Workshop

The storytelling traditions of Native American and Indigenous communities are rich and revered, intuitively woven into the fabric of daily life. Often relied upon to confer learnings and build intergenerational connection, Indigenous storytellers are the keepers of history, culture, and experience. Despite this deep storytelling legacy, Indigenous creators and their work are only just beginning to penetrate the boom of prestige television and streaming culture. Shows like Dark Winds and Reservation Dogs and films like Fancy Dance and Frybread Face and Me have recently found mainstream platforms and broader audiences, but Indigenous stories remain disproportionately sidelined. Even as streaming giants Netflix and Amazon take their productions to Native lands in New Mexico, where a burgeoning film and TV industry awaits, few projects are actually helmed by Native writers and directors.

Recognizing these persisting obstacles, the Tisch Graduate Film Program recently aimed to expand on its priority of cultivating and supporting Indigenous directors and writers. For three weeks in July and early August, the Graduate Film Program held a tuition-free intensive filmmaking workshop on-site in Santa Fe, New Mexico, marking the program’s first-ever off-campus instruction for non-University students. The program drew 11 students of varying filmmaking experience from New Mexico, Oklahoma, Washington, and Canada.

Grad Film Professor Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, an Iñupiaq filmmaker born and raised in Alaska, led a team of instructors and assistants in a collaboration with Santa Fe Community College and the Institute of American Indian Art. MacLean made his feature film directorial debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival with On the Ice and most recently served as a writer on ABC’s Alaska Daily. He was joined by Grad Film faculty and workshop co-creators Barbara Schock and Jennifer Ruff, who collectively envisioned the program as a condensed, satellite version of their on-campus instruction at Tisch.

“The workshop was built around a series of exercises that we do here at [Tisch],” MacLean said. “So it was giving [the students] a little taste of the program, and then we asked them to do a slightly more substantial exercise to finish with. Given that they're not able to really marshal the resources of a full film shoot, it’s still meant to be something that's pretty substantial.”

Tasked with spearheading the workshop’s curriculum, MacLean called upon the hands-on, intimate approach regularly applied in the Grad Film Program: teach, shoot, review. “I would give a lecture and talk about aspects of the craft, aspects of filmmaking, and then at the end of the lecture I would assign an exercise,” he said. “Usually the next day the students would be able to go off and shoot that exercise. They would come back the following day, edit in the morning, and then we'd meet in the afternoon and screen and critique the exercises.”

For Barbara Schock, an Oscar-winning director and former Grad Film chair, the program heralds new possibilities in Tisch’s ongoing support of Indigenous voices. “It's the first time that we've taken our Grad Film program—that type of education—off-site,” Schock said. “It’s meaningful because not everybody can afford grad school—and school isn't for everyone. I think for several of the students it made coming to NYU more possible. It’s now something they can imagine, whereas it might have seemed out of reach before.”

Schock’s co-creator on the program, Jennifer Ruff, hails from New Mexico and teaches editing at Tisch; in Santa Fe, she provided students with a specialized eye toward post-production. With her roots still in the region, she’s eager to cultivate the untapped talent that has otherwise gone overlooked by the major entertainment players.

“There wasn't this huge film industry when I was growing up,” Ruff said. “But when we went back we started to do some research and realized there was a lot of training happening in New Mexico, but more so crew training. You could be union trained; you could work on Netflix; you could work on Breaking Bad, but in terms of storytelling, we realized that's where we could bring what we're so good at to these students that we feel have some of the most important stories to tell now.”

One step toward realizing those aspirations is providing a model that eliminates filmmaking’s costly barriers to entry. Taking cues from the Grad Film Program curriculum, the Santa Fe students crewed for and acted in each other’s exercises, which remained intentionally lo-fi. “You shoot these exercises with one or two people, and we essentially packed a semester into three weeks,” Schock said. “The students said that watching each other direct was also very instructional and that they felt really bonded.”

The program’s outreach efforts yielded a pool of student filmmakers who impressed the Tisch faculty with their proficiency and savvy. MacLean recognized early on that the level of artistry among the students would allow the professors to push the filmmakers into new, challenging directions.

“They were grad student level in terms of where they are in life, but also in terms of some of the experience that they brought to it,” MacLean said. “And what that let us really do was not hold back. We can just teach the way that we like to teach our students, meaning hold them to the level of work that we feel comfortable. We can be demanding of them in terms of their time, in terms of their effort, in terms of their artistic investment. And we did that, and the students really really rose to that challenge.”

In October, faculty will return to Santa Fe to review students’ final projects. But Ruff feels the goals of the program are already beginning to take hold in the community. “It starts to feel like, ‘Hey, I can do this. It doesn't matter that I'm in New Mexico,’” she said. “They're finding their own voice, and that was sort of the point of this was trying to think about your own style. Not necessarily thinking about what makes a good film, but what kind of film they want to make.”

The intensive was a rare chance for MacLean to convene directly with Native artists, and as their time together came to a close, he took the opportunity to honor the rituals of Indigenous culture and offer an intimate coda to the workshop.

“I actually was coming down from Alaska, where I had brought my family to visit my home village up in Utqiagvik, which used to be called Barrow,” he said. “We were coming from the whaling celebration, and I was able to bring down some of our Indigenous traditional foods. I brought down two different kinds of whale to share with the students, muktuk and uunalik, and shared it with them at the end of [the intensive]. It’s an important thing for Indigenous communities, which are very much built around sharing and very much built around food. So that was something that was very meaningful to me.”