[Witness speaks in Inuktitut]
I am Lucy Tulugarjuk, executive producer at NITV, Nunavut Independent Television Network, and I work closely with Isuma Distribution International. I am thankful to be invited to attend this meeting.
Isuma is a collective group of companies and people who have been in the business of production, broadcasting and distribution of Inuit-language video content for the past 30 years. We are an Inuit organization but work as a national cross-cultural effort. I work with Jonathan Frantz, Norman Cohn, Zacharias Kunuk, and Sam.
Two of the founders of Isuma are Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, who are both elders and looking forward to retirement. Jonathan and I are the next generation of Isuma to continue to produce Inuit-made, Inuit-acted, Inuit-produced content, to continue to preserve our culture and language, and to hopefully have more years of our right to have published Inuit art into the media and into the audience at the national and international levels.
When we started, indigenous applications were not eligible at Canada's major funding agencies. Zacharias was among the first indigenous artists to get Canada Council funding. We lobbied for years with the Canada Media Fund and Telefilm Canada to access professional production financing and to help create what is now a rapidly growing Canadian indigenous production sector.
In the process, we made a film that went to Cannes in 2001 and is considered by the Toronto International Film Festival as Canada's best film of all time, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. That was my first time to be in a feature film as an actress, and from there on, I continued to work with Zacharias and Norman behind the camera and in front of the camera, casting and producing, and I did makeup and scriptwriting.
I did my first scriptwriting and directing a feature film and now we are premiering Tia and Piujuq, which is our first children's feature film in Inuktitut, English, French and Arabic. I'm hoping that in the future we will continue to produce more Inuit films so that we can continue to preserve our language and our culture.
I'll pass the microphone to my colleague, Jonathan.