Bretten Hannam

Bretten Hannam is a Canadian screenwriter and film director.[1]

A Two-Spirit, non-binary Mi'kmaq person, Hannam was born and raised in Nova Scotia.[1] Educated at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Dalhousie University, they made a number of short films in their early career; the most noted of these, Deep End, premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival in 2011[2] and was included in the short film compilation Boys on Film 9: Youth in Trouble.[3]

Their 2015 feature film, North Mountain, premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival in 2015 before going into limited commercial release in 2018.[4]

In 2018, they participated in Now and Then, an exhibition of works by LGBTQ artists in conjunction with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.[5] Their contribution was the short film Elmiteskuatl, an interrogation of the complex relationship between First Nations peoples and colonialist conceptions of archives and museums.[5]

Their most recent short film, Wildfire, was produced with the assistance of the Whistler Film Festival's Aboriginal Filmmaker Fellowship,[6] and premiered at BFI Flare in 2019. A feature film expansion of Wildfire, titled Wildhood, was funded by Telefilm Canada in June 2019,[7] and premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.[8] The film received six Canadian Screen Award nominations at the 10th Canadian Screen Awards in 2022, including nods for Hannam in both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.[9]

In 2020, Hannam received a grant from the Inside Out Film and Video Festival's Re:Focus Emergency Relief Fund for the completion of a short documentary film titled Walqwin, about two-spirit culture in the Wabanaki Confederacy.[10]

Hannam was named the winner of the $10,000 Toronto Film Critics Association's Jay Scott Prize for emerging filmmakers in February 2022.[11]