Aboriginal Filmmaker: Jérémie Wookey

I am Jérémie Wookey. A Franco-Métis filmmaker based in Winnipeg.

I grew up in a big, fat Franco-Manitoban family. Our culture and language played an integral role in every aspect of our lives but it wasn't until I was 8 or 9 that my family discovered our Métis blood. It was a secret my grandmother had kept from all of us but somehow, somewhere deep inside, along with countless other Manitobans our age, we felt it was there and with a little digging, our instincts were confirmed.

A few years later, I shot my sister's documentary, Mémére Métisse - her journey to help our grandmother let go of the shame she felt over her Aboriginal roots and become a proud Métis. It was quite a ride as all three of us-not just my Mémére- fostered deeper appreciations and understandings for our family history and our identities as Aboriginal people.

In 2008, Mémére Métisse premiered on the opening night of Toronto's imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. Janelle and I traveled together touring the film at Aboriginal festivals from Vancouver to Montreal to New York City. It was an amazing year both personally and professionally.

In 2010, I had an awesome time working on the production crew for APTN's historic Olympic Games broadcast. As a broadcast major of Red River College's Creative Communications program, I won both Broadcaster's Association of Manitoba Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Radio and Outstanding Achievement in Television, as well as the Creative Communications Media Award for Best Documentary - for my short documentary 'Sisters'.

Today most of my work is in hard news. As much as I enjoy that kind of fast-paced, fact-based, two-minute story-telling, my true passion is in pointing and pushing the camera a little deeper into the issues. My experience with 8TH Fire has been just that. There are many more stories to tell (or show) and I look forward to career in discovering and sharing them with Canada and the rest of the world.