"Want to build a film company with me?"
Billings Urban Indian Health and Wellness Center hosted a month-long filmmaking camp for Indigenous students.
Cadence Rondeaux-Hickman is 17 years old. She and her team of other young filmmakers have been working for four weeks to produce their first film.
“We chose our project on the MMIW, Missing Indigenous Women. And it's an experimental piece. It's to represent those and bring awareness that they're still out there somewhere and we, we need to remember them,” Rondeaux-Hickman says.
Rondeaux-Hickman says she’s excited to see how films are made and is considering a future career in media production.
Ivy McDonald is a Blackfeet documentary filmmaker, brought in to assist the students in their short films. She says during the camp she's seen students choose mature subject matter to film.
“You know, they're pretty hard topics, but I think the cool thing is, is like just letting them express themselves in that way and letting indigenous youth use something like film to express that because I believe filmmaking is the most beautiful way to express art,” Mcdonald says.
McDonald says representation in film is important.
“It's super important for indigenous people, especially indigenous youth to have an opportunity to tell their own stories and be the ones to kind of create what people see or how they see it,” Mcdonald says.
Justice Rock Above is another young filmmaker. He drives to Billings from Pryor every morning to attend the camp.
“Like the project we're doing is like, kind of like a, like a horror project,” Rock Above says.
Rock Above says he asked relatives to tell him stories they knew as the basis for his group's project.
“Evil spirits and stuff. So one of them was like Windigos, skin crawlers, skinwalkers I meant and rag, rag, roofs, and little people from Pryor mountains and stuff."
Rock Above says he’s loved doing an off-the-wall project and he also enjoyed that the filmmakers got paid. The ten participants were paid 25 dollars a day to attend the media camp, funded by local grants for suicide prevention.
Urban Indian Health and Wellness Center will host other camps throughout the summer such as a young Indigenous women's summit at the end of July.
