Featuring Roni Jo Draper, Ph.D. (Producer, Scenes from the Glittering World), Ciara Leinaala Lacy (Director, This is the Way We Rise), Justyn Ah Chong, (Director, Pili Ka Mo'o), and Colleen Thurston (Director, Drowned Land), moderated by Melissa Bisagni (Festival Director, D.C. Asian Pacific American Film Festival; Board Chair, D.C. Shorts International Film Festival)

Since the invention of cinema in the late 19th century, indigenous peoples and their land, culture, and resources have been a highly visible presence on the movie screen, romanticized and villainized in equal measure. Yet, these perennial images have almost always been shaped by the imagination of outsiders, culminating in a vast cinematic archive of harmful stereotypes and cultural misrepresentations. In recent years, the tides have finally begun to turn, and questions around representation in film, and all kinds of media for that matter, are reaching a fever pitch: who is telling the story, and what is their relationship to the community that they are representing, indigenous or otherwise? Extractive storytelling practices are no longer going unchallenged, while at the same time indigenous filmmakers are producing more work than ever before, presenting audiences with long-overdue perspectives and voices, and serving as agents of their own personal stories, or of broader indigenous communities. This panel will introduce a few of these remarkable visionary filmmakers whose work is being presented at this year’s festival and will explore how Indigenous storytelling is reclaiming the narrative.