Nancy, a short film by Vancouver Island filmmaker Eva Grant, screens as part of the 38th annual Vancouver Queer Film Festival.
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Vancouver Queer Film Festival
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When: Sept. 10–20
Where: Various theatres and online (Sept. 21–27)
Tickets and info:queerfilmfestival.ca
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In 1911, an 18-year-old Inuk woman named Nancy Columbia wrote and starred in a silent movie.
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Released in 1911, The Way of the Eskimo told the story of an Inuk woman caught between an Inuk hunter and a white trapper. Produced by Chicago’s Selig Polyscope Company and directed by William V. Mong, the approximately 14-minute film was based on a story by Columbia, who also played its female lead.
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Today, The Way of the Eskimo is considered lost. No print is known to survive.
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That absence fascinated Vancouver Island filmmaker Eva Grant, whose new short Nancy reimagines the young woman’s experience making the film.
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“I was very interested in the fact that nothing remains of Nancy’s film but the edges, the boundaries of the story,” Grant said. “That is what I sought to depict or reimagine or honour in my film, where she is the subject and the author.”
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Nancy screens as part of the 38th annual Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Presented by Out On Screen, this year’s festival features 87 features and shorts by 2SLGBTQIA+ filmmakers from around the world, with the theme A Seat at Our Table.
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Grant has two shorts at this year’s festival. Mirth Control, described as “a surreal feminist take on how patriarchy weaponizes laughter into a performance of pleasure,” is a collaboration with her mother.
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Grant became interested in Columbia while visiting Los Angeles on a university trip. An exhibition included photographs and other material about the young performer and references to The Way of the Eskimo.
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“I became very excited to see this movie,” Grant said. “But then I learned that it is considered a lost film.”
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Although the film itself has disappeared, traces remain. Contemporary reviews and plot descriptions survive, along with photographs documenting the production.
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Grant tracked down some of those images in a Michigan archive.
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“In many of these old photos, they’re titled ‘Eskimo actors,’ ‘Native actors at work,’” she said. “But there is a photo of Nancy that was titled at the time ‘Eskimo filmmaker,’ and it was cool to see her recognized that way.”
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Nancy Columbia’s career grew out of a more troubling history. Columbia Eneutseak, her birth name, was born in Chicago in 1893 to 15-year-old Esther Eneutseak, who was performing at the World’s Columbian Exposition as part of the fair’s “Esquimaux Village.”
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Her mother’s journey from Labrador to Chicago was part of a late-19th- and early-20th-century trade in ethnographic exhibitions that transported Indigenous people across borders and presented supposedly authentic versions of their lives to paying audiences.
