TJ Cuthand

In 1995 when Thirza Cuthand was 16 she felt like the only lesbian at her Saskatoon high school. This turned out to be untrue, but the lack of visibility in her high school coupled with the lack of representation of queer teenagers in the 90's made her make her first video, a comedic short about teenage lesbian loneliness and trying to bribe classmates to come out with the promise of candy.

Half-breed Alice attempts to become queen and struggles with the Red Queen and the White Queen's disapproval of her racial transgressions.

Pre-contact, a Two Spirit person named Woman Dress travels the Plains, gathering and sharing stories. Featuring archival images and dramatized re-enactments, this film shares a Cuthand family oral story, honouring and respecting Woman Dress without imposing colonial binaries on them.

Reclamation is a documentary futurism short about three Indigenous survivors left behind on Earth after white people leave a destroyed planet behind for Mars. While seemingly dystopic, this film is filled with hope and humor and looks at potential solutions for current crises.

On the way to her girlfriend's place, an Indigenous woman is assaulted by her cab driver. Amidst the struggle, she discovers a deadly supernatural power that may help solve the mystery of her mother's disappearance.

Theo practices his guitars! He’s not very good at it yet but he’s trying.

A Two Spirited woman surrounded by spy signals and psychiatric walls attempts to make sense of love, global paranoia, and her place in the history of colonialism. Spliced in between her monologues are the binary codes of all the psychiatric drugs she has taken.

Invited to speak at an Indigenous Revolutionary Meeting, the narrator describes an intimate encounter with an Evil Colonizing Queen which led to Turtle Island's contraction of an invasive European flora.

In the dark night of a prairie city, a vampire considers her future with a fetching mortal. But requiring blood for sustenance brings a host of problems to the relationship.

An original video diary documenting the director's efforts to have artificial insemination. Cuthand describes his desire to have children of his own and the difficult journey he must take to have them, a journey that is also closely tied to his membership in Canada's First Nations and thus to the question of preserving his indigenous culture.

Sounds and visuals give a “physical” overview of the Land Question, and Cuthand turns the question around regarding what it means to own or be owned.

In The Lost Art of the Future, Cuthand talks about artists he has known who passed away while living with HIV/AIDS and the art he wishes he had been able to see them make if their lifetimes had been longer.

A teenage lesbian's attempts to form friendships with older lesbians leads her on a disturbing ride through the ageist terrain of the lesbian community.

Anhedonia doesn't play to the back of the church. It shoots directly to the point with poetry and images that evoke controversy in one mind set and passion in another. Depression and suicide are met head on with Cuthand's honesty. Anhedonia shocks people into opening their eyes to the source of the illness in the Aboriginal community. Statistics, split images, words and flesh meld together making this short film long on compassion, screaming out for help and recognition of the mentally ill's dream of someday having a normal life.

Weaving together family narratives and current thoughts on the pandemic, the ethics of representation, and the nature of the sacred, Thirza Cuthand discusses a medicine bundle which was used to heal the artist’s great-great-grandfather from a Gatling gunshot wound in 1885, and her grandfather from the Spanish flu in 1918. In this film, Cuthand reflects on the ways that the bear cub spirit contained within the since-buried bundle has continued to protect her family from the trauma and diseases brought on by colonization.

Cuthand explores a confusing new gas mask fetish and confronts the feelings associated with being implicated in tear gas manufacturing and chemical companies through her art practice. Beautiful and complicated, this video explores the artists role in larger societal issues along with personal ramifications.

Super 8 footage layered with Sharpie marked lines and circles obscuring the image illustrates the story of the filmmaker’s experience with temporary episodes of migraine related blindness and her cousin’s self induced blindness later in life. Paralleling the experience of Blindness with Mental Illness, Cuthand deftly elucidates that any of us could lose any of our abilities at any time.

A love story about the history of an interracial family's ancestors and the lands they emigrated from and migrated to. It is also a personal story about being mixed race.

A young lesbian, frustrated with a recent relationship, explores bisexuality and has an enlightening discovery.

Frances, a young Gay Indian (2 Spirit) (played by Lacey Hill with song performed by Lacey Hill) is struggling with the aftermath of a gay bashing. Through her friendship with her ex Jean, she gathers the strength to go out in public again. This video is a salute to the 70's and to Gay Indian movements which became 2 Spirit/Indigiqueer communities.

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A girl with a bad habit of falling for older women befriends a boy lover. This video is an examination of relationships between adults and teenagers. It involves ice cream trucks and bowie knives.

A helpless maiden is tiring of her consensual S&M relationship with her lover, and "evil" queen. She wants to break up. An impassioned monologue in a dungeon with our heroine in wrist cuffs quickly becomes an emotionally messy ending in flames.

This video was made to talk about abuse in psychiatry, which I experienced in Montreal. However I chose to let others words explain my feelings on the topic. The visuals are recontextualized shots from The Miracle Worker, starring Patty Duke as Helen Keller. Patty Duke went on to develop bipolar disorder, like me. The main sound used in this video is from the radio emissions captured by the Cassini space probe from Saturn.