Miley Wolki and Darryl Tedjuk are approaching their film-making goals with new enthusiasm after attending the Yellowknife International Film Festival (YKIFF).
YKIFF ran from Nov. 6-10 this year. Wolki, 16, and Tedjuk, 20, are students at Tuktoyaktuk's Mangilaluk School. They were sent to the Yellowknife festival by the Inuvialuit Communications Society and Tuk TV, a youth film-making collective based in the community of just under 1,000 people.
Tedjuk called the event "a very good experience," while Wolki described it as "very enjoyable and educational."
The pair, who were in town for the duration of the festival, spent much of their visit watching films. They had a number of favourites, but the common item on both of their lists was a film called The G.
"It was very good," said Tedjuk. Wolki referred to it as "brilliant."
When they weren't watching movies, Tedjuk and Wolki spent their time in Yellowknife rubbing shoulders with other film devotees, industry experts and even a few celebrities.
Wolki, for example, got to meet Cree and Metis actress Tantoo Cardinal, who notably appeared alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in the 2023 Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon.
"She was awesome," Wolki said of Cardinal. "I also met a bunch of other people who did amazing work on different films and [learned about] different ways of writing, filming, editing, which was amazing.
"I learned a lot from some people there," she added. "The idea of Indigenous people doing these amazing things got reinforced in my mind and gave me more confidence in exploring film."
Wolki is involved in many extracurricular activities in and out of the film industry, but after attending YKIFF, she hopes to gain more experience as an actress.
"I'd like to get more involved in acting and filming and editing," she said. "Acting is a big one. Once I get a laptop, I'll try to find an editing app to try out, but my really big goal is acting, and maybe script writing, because I really do like writing."
Tedjuk, meanwhile, has plenty of his own ambition in the film industry.
He's been hard at work editing a Tuk TV documentary film called 'Happening to Us,' which highlights the impacts of climate change on his and Wolki's home community.
The original version of the project SA国际影视传媒� which Tedjuk and his peers debuted at the COP25 United Nations climate change conference held in Madrid, Spain, in 2019SA国际影视传媒� was only 20 minutes long. Yet after the success of the initial entry, the group elected to expand the project into a longer film that will also explore some of the "solutions" to the climate change-related problems their community faces.
Tuk TV is planning on releasing the updated film in late March 2025. Attending the film festival made Tedjuk even more eager to share the completed product with the world.
"I'm excited to finish our film and show it to other people," he said. "I'll be very happy to show people our hard work."
While Tuk TV is a youth-led collective, Mangilaluk School vice-principal and teacher Michele Tomasino has been involved in their initiatives in a "supporting role."
She said "it's been amazing" to watch the students' skills and confidence grow, and pledged that their work will continue.
"We're still making movies," she said. "We still have the equipment here and we're still using it."
