The imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, which ran Oct. 20-24 in Toronto, is an international event showcasing works by aboriginal peoples in the realms of film, video, radio and new media. Samantha Anderson kept a blog for CBCNews.ca on this year's festival.

I attended the Media Mash-Up: Foundlings on Thursday night, curious to see what this unusual-sounding multimedia performance was about.

The piece, which incorporated film and projection techniques, told the story of Harmon, a successful Cree consultant who was looking for a father through an adult adoption agency, known to the audience as the Gallery Agency. Harmon never knew his father and wanted to be a better dad to his own children. The set consisted of a couch and a television screen surrounded by the art of the venue.

Harmon, dressed in a suit, finds his ideal dad, who is projected onto the wall and speaks to Harmon thorough a video. This is after Harmon goes through an all-too familiar bureaucratic process personified by actor Tara Beagan, the unnamed agent of the "high-end familial matchmaking company." Because he is in Phase Four of the adoption process, Harmon is encouraged to view the profile video of his potential new father, Ambrose, played by Paul Chaput.

"I think you're the fellow who can walk along with me," Ambrose says in the video. "It's great we both ended up here."

Beagan makes eye contact with the audience throughout the performance, stating that we were Phase One clients who had gone through police background checks and were in the clear to observe Harmon's decision to view the video.

Michael Greyeyes, who plays Harmon, says the performance alluded to the absence of fathers in aboriginal communities.

"It's sort of like a call to action: Where are the fathers?" Greyeyes told me. "It's a strongly political piece."

Beagan added that the politics of the piece deal with an imbalance of power in gender and the challenges of bureaucracy.

-- Samantha Anderson