The work of Lindsay McIntyre, film artist and Assistant Professor of Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University, was featured on the most recent cover of Inuit Art Quarterly, a full-colour art journal dedicated to connecting Inuit Nunangat with readers across the globe.

The accompanying feature interview with Lindsay came just ahead of a showing of her film project Bloodline, at Art Toronto at the end of October.

In the interview, Lindsay, who is of Inuk/settler Scottish descent, reflects on the some of the central themes of the five individual films that make up Bloodline, all of which focus broadly on Lindsay’s matrilineage, and the story of her great-grandmother, Kumaa’naaq, who was taken from her home in the north in 1936.

Lindsay also digs into the ways in which her history as a visual artist has informed her relationship to film media, and how her use of particular formats is sometimes dictated by necessity.

“I spent a lot of time researching how the act of shooting film, like shooting 16mm film in a camera, could become closer to the act of drawing,” she tells IAQ’s Contributing Editor Napatsi Folger.

“In media, there’s such a connection between your hand and your eye. It’s a really rewarding form to work in. I think, for me, it’s really important to have materials in my hands. If I’m sitting at a computer, typing and clicking in buttons and editing in that fashion, it’s not as satisfying a process for me.”

Lindsay has, she notes, made two works that were shot digitally — one of which is included in Bloodline, and the other she shot in the North, in Qamanit’uaq.

“There was a woman that I wanted to make a portrait of, an Elder from the community, but there wasn’t enough light in late November at Latitude 67 to shoot any of the film I shoot with—I mostly shoot on high contrast black and white stock, which means that I need an enormous amount of light to be able to expose it,” she says.

“And it was really challenging to get access to chemistry and finding spaces that were dark enough to be able to process. There were all kinds of challenges around using film, and I had a limited amount of time with her because she would just get so tired.”

Film and video, however, are simply not the same medium insofar as Lindsay’s practice is concerned, she says.

“They both capture images, but they are very different forms, and serve different purposes. If I was shooting a narrative film, I might choose digital, but most of my practice is embedded in the practice of analog film. When I chose to shoot with digital video, it made a massive difference. I had this incredibly powerful lens, which I would not normally have had access to in film. It felt very intrusive to have this much power with this video camera.”

You can read the full interview here to find out more about Lindsay’s extraordinary techniques and practice, and about her Bloodline project. You can also check out her films on her website and Vimeo page.