Jared Lank
Jared Lank (Mi’kmaq) is an award winning interdisciplinary filmmaker and artist based in Maine. His films explore identity and belonging, focusing on the existential nuances of cultural loss, erasure, and assimilation. Through metaphor and an Indigenous cultural lens, his films expose the colonial underpinnings of society’s systemic race and equity problems, emphasizing the ill effects of globalization on Indigenous people, culture, and land, often through a perspective informed by intergenerational trauma and lived experience. He incorporates traditional knowledge, mythos, and cosmology in his films as central archetypes, and uses film as a reflective medium for contemplating various ontological themes. He is currently writing his first feature-length film as a 2024 Sundance Institute Indigenous Film Fund Fellow.
His first independent short film, Bay of Herons, was an official selection of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and screened as part of the 2024 Sundance Indigenous Shorts Tour. The film has also screened at numerous festivals internationally, including the Camden International Film Festival, Regard: Saguenay International Short Film Festival (Indigenous Perspectives Award), Norwegian Short Film Festival, Maine Outdoor Film Festival and Bates Film Festival (Best Short Award).
In addition to writing and directing, Lank also practices music composition and still photography. His interdisciplinary works have been featured in several notable museums, including the Portland Museum of Art and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. He also is a long-time advocate for Wabanaki representation in education and is currently a lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Southern Maine.
The image is a still from Jared Lank's film Bay of Herons.
Synopsis
Calling on the strength of his ancestors, a young Mi’kmaq man reflects on the pain of bearing witness to the destruction of his homelands.
2023 | 7 min
Written & Directed by Jared Lank
Music by Jared Lank
