Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre is an Indigenous experimental filmmaker based in Canada with a filmography spanning over 40 short films almost exclusively shot on 16mm film. Her work is deeply personal, giving her an artistic pathway to deal with struggles, learn new ways of being, and experiment with ways to connect to her land and ancestors. In “Tuktuit: Caribou,” McIntyre creates a connection between form and content — her film is about the interconnected relationship between caribou and lichen, and she literally uses caribou and lichen in her 16mm film processing. She approaches filmmaking less as a storyteller, but as an artist, using analog film and chemical hand-processing as her medium.
I wanted to start by talking about your filmmaking process. I read a bit about it online and was really intrigued. Can you talk about shooting on film for this project, and what the developing and chemical processes were like?
It’s quite involved. I’ve made almost 50 short films now, and nearly all of them were shot on film. Only three originated digitally. I’m always involved in processing my own film, but for this project I took things to another level.
Some of the film is color, some is black and white. I processed it using developers made from lichen. I was also making my own emulsion by processing caribou hide down into gelatin, which I then used in handmade emulsion recipes I’ve developed myself. Those emulsions are primarily made of silver bromide and gelatin.
That’s wild. How did you know that would work?
I didn’t — and I never do. My practice is really an engagement with failure. If something isn’t hard, if you’re not failing in some way, you’re probably not learning much. Making things difficult for myself is actually a major driving force in my work.
It takes about three days to make an emulsion, not including processing the caribou hide, which can take months. It’s labor-intensive and unpredictable. You never know if the emulsion will work, if it’ll be chemically or physically compromised, or if it’ll fail entirely.
What’s important to me is the connection between form and content. This film is about caribou and lichen, and it’s literally made with caribou and lichen. Caribou subsist almost entirely on one type of lichen — reindeer moss — and depending on what they’ve eaten, the gelatin made from their hide behaves completely differently.
So if the hide comes from a male or female caribou, or one from summer versus fall, the emulsion changes. Every time I make one, it’s a new discovery. I can never guarantee it will work the same way again. Everything is deeply interconnected.
I love that connection between form and content.
I came to film more as an artist than a traditional storyteller, and having form and content be inseparable has always been important to me. It makes the work feel more alive and more meaningful.
I’ve been making handmade emulsions since around 2010, when Kodak discontinued my favorite film stock. I didn’t want a corporation deciding the fate of my art form. If you’re a painter, you can make your own paints. If you draw, you can burn your own charcoal. But film was the first art form that was completely dependent on industry.
Once digital technology took over, film infrastructure — labs, manufacturers — began disappearing. Film became expensive and resource-dependent. What interested me was asking: what can I do with these discarded machines and materials? How can I push film beyond what it was meant to do?
For me, that shift wasn’t scary — it was exciting. Film no longer had to do everything, so it could become something more specific and expressive. I’m always asking: what are the boundaries of this medium, and how far can I push them?
This was the first film where I worked with caribou hide, all sourced from my home territory of Qamani’tuaq. It was a way to deepen my engagement with both my community and the land.
Can you talk more about your connection to the land and the caribou in the film, and why that relationship is so important to you?
On my mother’s side, my family is from Qamani’tuaq, the only inland settlement in the North and the geographic center of Canada. For generations, my family subsisted almost entirely on caribou. In the North, caribou are essential — they provide warmth, shelter, clothing, tools, everything.
This film was a way to honor caribou and to honor my ancestors — my grandparents — and what it took to make my life possible. Part of that honoring is the labor involved. Processing caribou hide for the first time was incredibly difficult, and I was terrible at it at first. I actually loved that. I thrive on learning through struggle.
I also think of the film as a collaboration — not just my vision, but a collaboration with caribou and the land itself. The materials shape the outcome. It becomes multi-vocal, a conversation between the animate and inanimate world. The process is a way of attuning to place and deepening my relationship to where I come from.
Are there other Native artists or artworks that inspire you?
I’m inspired by Indigenous artists who challenge assumptions and systems — that’s our job as artists. I’m drawn to work that’s both beautiful and poetic but also deeply challenging.
Beyond film, I’m inspired by artists working with hides and organic materials. Working on this film taught me so much about caribou hide that I’ve started making physical objects from it — bags, rawhide pieces, sculptural forms.
The film was part of a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, where I projected it onto a giant caribou hide — the first one I ever processed. I also made other objects, including a bag modeled after a 300-year-old sealskin bag, that had a lot of utility and purpose in the world. This bag would have been used for many things and I made it out of a caribou hide instead of sealskin, and I punched about 3000 holes in it. It’s supposed to be a waterproof bag, but it doesn’t hold water in the version that I made. I’m looking at the differences between those objects, not as a critique of one vs the other, but a reflection.
I’m also the Executive Director of the Inuit Art Foundation and publisher of Inuit Art Quarterly, so I’m constantly immersed in contemporary Inuit art. I’m endlessly inspired by artists who think deeply about material and process. I’m very process-oriented — I don’t plan my films ahead of time. They reveal themselves through making.
You’ve made nearly 50 films. How do you feel like you’ve changed over the course of this career, and how has the artwork changed you?
I make films to process things I’m dealing with. Every film exists because I needed to understand something — a story, a form, a history, or myself.
Several of my films deal with my family’s story of moving from the North to the South through colonial forces. Last year I made a short called Nigihtok (The South Wind), which explores my great-grandmother’s daughter being taken south by an RCMP officer. That event shaped my entire family history and my own sense of cultural distance growing up.
That film qualified for the Oscars, and it’s a drama — very different from my experimental work — because the medium has to match what I’m exploring. Sometimes digital is right. Sometimes film is right. The materials themselves shape me as much as I shape them.
Each film represents who I was at that moment — what I was learning, struggling with, and processing. It’s an expensive form of therapy, honestly. If you look at all my films, you’ll know a lot about me. I can only tell stories that are mine, and so inevitability that makes all of my work very personal. And that’s also a commitment to my community. It matters who draws the maps, who writes the histories and whose story becomes true in the world.
These films are how I grow and change in the world, so they’re everything to me.
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