Our project, FEARLESS Film Festival: Spill the Beans came to life in June 2022. Our team of 15, including teens from what is colonially known as Richmond and the Lower Mainland, are all passionate about making a difference in our community. Together, we planned our event over the course of 2.5 months through our weekly meetings.
Our team, FEARLESS, is a women, non-binary and trans empowerment group based in Richmond. The goal for our last event of the year was to bring awareness and share knowledge surrounding Indigenous women and girls. We showed the movie, ‘Beans,’ directed by Tracey Deer to show the successful Indigenous youth-led and female resistance during the Oka Crisis in the ’90s. We also would have a discussion session after watching the movie for attendees to share their thoughts.
Our goals listed in our event proposal are below:
– To provide an opportunity for youth to learn more about Indigenous women and their experiences
– To gather youth to meet each other
– To allow healthy discussion about Indigenous women and explore different perspectives
A challenge that came up during the later stages of planning was failing to realize we needed a license to publicly show the movie, ‘Beans,’ at our event. We had already created marketing material, among other documents and files for our event. We were luckily able to apply for grants to fund this license, but our event heavily depended on getting grant money so we could buy the license to show the movie. This resulted in having to wait for a few weeks before making a final decision; on whether we would show the movie ‘Beans’ or a different movie and have to make many last-minute changes to our event. Luckily, with teamwork, communication and our generous sponsors (thank you YNSG!), we were able to pull off our original event plan.
We should mention; that not only were we able to go with our original plan for FEARLESS Film Festival, but we also had the opportunity to support a local Indigenous restaurant, Salmon n’ Bannock, by purchasing bannock for our event.
Overall, our event was successful! Not only were we able to achieve our goals; but as a team, FEARLESS learned a lot from planning this event. We all improved in our organization and teamwork skills, and now know to always give ourselves more time to plan an event.
