How the hell did a Canadian film lover like Cole Forrest (Nipissing First Nation Anishanaabe) end up in Santa Fe, anyway?
“It’s one of my favorite stories,” Forrest says with a wry smile. “I was programming the ImagiNATIVE Film Festival in Toronto, and I’d seen [Santa Fe-based filmmaker] Peshawn Bread’s film [The Daily Life of Mistress Red], and I was championing it for the festival—I had this list of filmmakers I wanted to meet, and it was really just Peshawn.”
Regular readers might recall Peshawn Bread from our recent profile Bread and Circuses. Oh, and by the way—Mistress Red did indeed screen at that festival in 2022, and Forrest just so happened to run into Bread while each was en route to a nearby bookstore. They fell in love, did long-distance for a time and Forrest eventually moved to Santa Fe full-time in late 2023.
“I’d never even been to America, but I think you should always move with love and through love and that’s what brought me down here,” Forrest continues. “I really did fall in love with Santa Fe, too, almost immediately.”
The impetus for staying, beyond Forrest’s paramour?
“This is sacred land,” Forrest says. “The people here, the Tewa people and their specific tribes…have always been here, and you can sense that. It’s the same way in my community back home.”
Since then, Forrest has made themself right at home, specifically through the film and visual arts worlds. They create and sell art made from pearls, though they sort of brush that off as a side hustle to their work as a filmmaker and film programmer. They officially took Cinema Artistic Programmer job at the Center for Contemporary Arts (1050 Old Pecos Trail, (505) 982-1338) in February. But it was a long road getting there, Forrest notes.
“My origins, I guess you could say, were that I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was a kid and I didn’t think much about aspirations,” they explain. “I was homeless multiple times as a kid, not to sob about it, and it was just my mom and I trying to survive together.”
Films became an escape. Today, Forrest is working toward producing their first feature and they try to complete at least one short a year. Back then, however, the mainstream movies available at rental joints proved inspirational and a solid distraction.
“I grew up with a lot of pop culture movies, and it wasn’t honestly until my second year of high school that I started to consider filmmaking myself,” they tell SFR. “An Indigenous filmmaker came to do a workshop, and I made a short with my cousin. I slapped a Bon Iver song on it, and I thought, ‘this is cool—I want to feel that again.’”
For college, Forrest says, they bounced around a bit before landing at George Brown College in Toronto. During that two-year film program, they spent their time on sets learning about directing, producing, the ins and outs of camera systems and so forth.
“And I had a lot of great mentors, not just in film, but in the arts in general, and these were all Indigenous artists,” they say. “I realized there’s so much you can do in the arts, there’s so much you can do in film. I realized I really did just want to be a director and artist who made their own stuff, which I get to do now. There was a built-in obsession with art and film, and I think that’s because so many people I was around were obsessed. Obsession begets, y’know?”
Which brings us back around to the CCA. Certainly it has been a fraught few years for the nonprofit. In 2023, it came perilously close to shuttering altogether, but the board managed a last-minute reprieve. Still, then-Executive Director Danyelle Means (Oglala Lakota) left the institution rather abruptly that same year, and the Cinema itself ran for a time on the volunteer leadership of filmmaker and Santa Fean Paul Barnes. Following that, the CCA theater burned through a number of department leads, including Luke Henley (full disclosure, this writer has a personal relationship with Henley) and No Name Cinema co-founder Justin Clifford Rhody. This was before Forrest’s time, however, and they’re focused more on the future, anyway.
“This position allows me to give people and audiences and filmmakers opportunities,” they say. “I can help get filmmakers’ stuff on the screen. We’re going to support local filmmakers, New Mexico filmmakers, queer filmmakers, BIPOC filmmakers…my thing also is supporting the CCA’s cinephile audience and honoring what it’s supposed to be—you’ll be seeing the things you won’t see anyplace else, and programming that is in service to the community.”
Forrest recently screened Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, for example, with an appearance from former CCA head Barnes. Yojimbo is also on the docket, and future films include the Apocalypse Now doc Hearts of Darkness (alongside the actual Coppola film); plus foreign works like France’s Souleymane’s Story; queer cinema like Twinless; and far more screenings, panels, events, one-offs and other events than can be listed here.
“I definitely would like to broaden the CCA scope, and a part of that is accessibility,” Forrest says. “We’re coming into what we might call an ‘auteur series,’ but we’re finalizing some other films and we’ll have, for example, Almodóvar. CCA also has a fairly large deaf community, and that means films with open caption screenings.”
Don’t worry if indie, foreign or arthouse cinema feels daunting, however, as Forrest also plans to continue to show films by the likes of Wes Anderson and Ari Aster. They’ll also screen the previously lost 1991 Kazakhstani epic Fall of Otrar.
Forrest hasn’t stopped at the movie theater, either. As we speak, they’re in the midst of a part-time professorship at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Forrest’s Indigenous Media class looks at the Native impact on modern culture through film, television, radio and, by extension, the broader North American artistic discourse. Yes, this includes covering well-known work like Powwow Highway and Smoke Signals, but, Forrest says, they’ll also highlight lesser-known media, such as the 1940 Oklahoma University-based radio program Indians on Indians or Native contributions to popular music (it’s still kind of weird that not everyone knows “Come and Get Your Love” band Redbone was all-Native). Indigenous folks have always had a hand in the arts, both mainstream and not, and while Forrest says they do feel a certain level of pressure and responsibility to showcase that reality—especially during a time when Native-led film and television seems to have finally reached critical mass.
“With that pressure, the other side of the coin is a responsibility to your community and your fellow artists and people you love. That’s a beautiful thing. It’s not something to shy away from.”
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