Bretten Hannam is a Canadian screenwriter and film director. [1]
A Two-Spirit, non-binary Mi'kmaq person, Hannam was born and raised in Nova Scotia. [1] Educated at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Dalhousie University, they made a number of short films in their early career; the most noted of these, Deep End, premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival in 2011 [2] and was included in the short film compilation Boys on Film 9: Youth in Trouble . [3]
Their 2015 feature film, North Mountain , premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival in 2015 before going into limited commercial release in 2018. [4]
In 2018, they participated in Now and Then, an exhibition of works by LGBTQ artists in conjunction with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. [5] Their contribution was the short film Elmiteskuatl, an interrogation of the complex relationship between First Nations peoples and colonialist conceptions of archives and museums. [5]
Their most recent short film, Wildfire, was produced with the assistance of the Whistler Film Festival's Aboriginal Filmmaker Fellowship, [6] and premiered at BFI Flare in 2019. A feature film expansion of Wildfire, titled Wildhood , was funded by Telefilm Canada in June 2019, [7] and premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. [8] The film received six Canadian Screen Award nominations at the 10th Canadian Screen Awards in 2022, including nods for Hannam in both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. [9]
In 2020, Hannam received a grant from the Inside Out Film and Video Festival's Re:Focus Emergency Relief Fund for the completion of a short documentary film titled Walqwin, about two-spirit culture in the Wabanaki Confederacy. [10]
Hannam was named the winner of the $10,000 Toronto Film Critics Association's Jay Scott Prize for emerging filmmakers in February 2022. [11]
Hannam's film At the Place of Ghosts (Sk+te’kmujue’katik) is slated to premiere in the Platform Prize program at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. [12]