Native Youth Film Academy

Native Youth Make Films To "Tell Their Own Stories"

By Michelle Theriault BootsTinker and her partners, Reed McWilliams and Sheila Evan, are aspiring filmmakers, in Anchorage for a weeklong workshop that aims to give Western Alaska youth the tools to tell their own stories on film.

Today, they’re scouting locations for a short film about a Yup'ik teenager who gets separated from her friend on her first trip to a shopping mall and uses tracking skills, developed on the tundra, to find her at the end of a trail of dropped Skittles.

They are among 14 students from Western Alaska participating in the Pilinguaq Project's Native Youth Film Academy, held this week in Anchorage.

Each wrote and scripted stories on the theme “survival,” to be told onscreen.Comment:  For more on the subject, see Ho-Chunk Players Make Short Films and The Best Indian Movies.