A “cinema of sovereignty”: working in the cultural interface to create a model for fourth world film pre-production and aesthetics

This thesis examines the Indigeneity of Indigenous films/videos in an era of globalization. I explain the challenges of an Indigenous filmmaker writing within a Western institution that does not recognize Indigenous systems of knowledge. I take Barry Barclay‘ theme of ―Dance With the Other‖ and use it with Martin Nakata‘s work on cultural interface and Indigenous standpoint theories to develop an Indigenous methodology for this thesis and for a production framework guided by Barclay‘s operating principles. Using Canada as my example, I include theoretical frameworks of Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists for Indigenous production in George Manuel‘s Fourth World and Barclay‘s Fourth World Cinema, and Randolph Lewis‘s ―Cinema of Sovereignty.‖ I use four models to understand an innovative visually sovereign practice: Indigenous writers‘ model, Abadian‘s cultural healing paradigm; Roth‘s co-development model and Mills‘ model for de-centering Hollywood as center of global cinema.