Catherine Potvin is a professor in biology at McGill University who has been working since 1993 with Panama’s Indigenous groups including the Emberá, on cultural and environmental protection. Chair holder of the UNESCO/McGill Chair for Dialogues on Sustainability, and Trottier Professor in Sustainability and Science Outreach, and Miroslaw Romanowski Medal laureate (2012) from the Royal Society of Canada she is the co-founder of the Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Bayano in Panama that provides context for youth filmmaking training activities.
Ariella Orbach is a community development consultant who works with Indigenous communities in Canada and in Latin America to design, manage and facilitate projects that build capacity, engage youth, develop sustainable local economies and uncover innovative paths to community well-being. She has been collaborating closely with Mapuche communities in the Ayja Rewe Budi traditional territory (Wajmapu/Chile) since 2011.
Iphigénie Marcoux-Fortier has been concocting documentaries since the turn of the millennium. She has co-founded the production company Les glaneuses, through which she co-creates films anchored in the territory. These films raise questions of identity, highlight intercultural encounters, philosophies of life (or death) and, like a silent mantra, they listen to details. As a filmmaker-mentor, she has accompanied the creation of more than forty short films in an indigenous context. In light of this background, Iphigénie conceives documentary filmmaking as a political and poetic process, as a flagship tool, and as a tool for bridge building.
Thora Herrmann is Professor at the Université de Montréal, with expertise in action research-creation projects in polar regions on place-based Indigenous knowledge and identity using visual art-based methodologies, such as filmmaking and photovoice, and also interactive mapping. She works in First Nation, Inuit, Mapuche and Sámi contexts. She is co-editor (with Th. Martin) of the book “Indigenous Peoples Governance of Land and Protected Territories in the Arctic” (Springer, 2016), and co-editor (with S. Gergaud) of the forthcoming book “Indigenous Cinemas: representations in movement”(L’Harmattan).
