NANCY
a film by Eva Grant

based on a true story

THE TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION

BUT FICTION IS NO STRANGER TO TRUTH

In 1893, an Inuk baby named Nancy Columbia Palmer Eneutseak was born in a fake igloo at a human zoo at the Chicago World's Fair. Eighteen years later, Nancy wrote and starred in a silent film called "The Way of The Eskimo," becoming the first Indigenous screenwriter. No copies of this film have survived to the present day.

NANCY
NARRATIVE HISTORICAL SHORT 10 MIN

Nancy tells the incredible true story of Nancy Columbia Eneutseak Palmer, a Nunatsiavut Indigenous woman from Labrador., Canada. She was born in 1893 in a human zoo at the Chicago World’s Fair. as part of an "ethnographic exhibit". known as The Eskimo Village. Nancy became its star attraction when news broke that her mother had given birth inside a fake igloo on the fairgrounds. Nancy's name was bestowed not by traditional Inuit naming ceremony but by public spectacle. Yes she embraced all of it, her strong sense of identity and connection to a home she'd never known fuelling a childhood in show business, which she pursued her entire adult life.

BORN INTO SPECTACLE

Against all odds, in an industry designed to devour women, children, and people of colour, she broke through every barrier. At just 18 she wrote and starred in a silent film entitled The Way of the Eskimo, of which sadly no known copies exist. Nevertheless, Nancy remains one of the first and youngest filmmakers of all time, one of the first-ever women in film, and the first Indigenous screenwriter to produce a film of any kind, let alone an Indigenous-centred one.

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT ON THE COLONIAL NARRATIVE

Meet Us

This period piece re-imagines Nancy seeing her film on screen for the first time.. Alone in the theatre, she manages a private showing just ahead of the premiere.. Before the crowds arrive, before the stares and the gaze, she turn her lens towards images she had created in her mind's eye alone. And then we watch her see herself and her home for the first time. And we realize that Nancy has always known who she was and where she came from. A memory carved in ice and stone, a feeling forged by distance.. Remembrance unsevered is resistance survived, and lineage revived,