Reclamation

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.

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.

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.

A personal film about Canada's extraction industry and its detrimental effects on the land and Indigenous peoples. This film parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension Industry. As the filmmaker reviews her life and how these Industries have affected her, she also reflects on having her own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com queers and indigenizes traditional dating site advertisements. Using a Butch NDN 'lavalife" lady (performed by director Thirza Cuthand), 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com seduces the viewer into 2 Spirit "snagging and shacking up" with suggestions of nearby pipeline protests to take your date to, and helpful elders who will matchmake you and tell off disrespectful suitors. It's the culturally appropriate website all single 2 Spirit people wish existed.

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.