On the night of Friday, September 11, 2026, the Shaw Amphitheatre at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity will become an open-air cinema beneath the Rockies, screening two films by Blackfoot documentarian Trevor Solway. The event, titled "Iikaiksimatsa'pao'p and Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man," pairs two of Solway's recent works. Together, the two films—a thirteen-minute short and a seventy-seven-minute feature—offer a rare, insider portrait of the Siksika Nation, told by a filmmaker who grew up there.
The evening pairs Solway's two most recent works. The first, "Iikaiksimatsa'pao'p" (Grateful to Be on the Land), follows Cassie Ayoungman, a climber, member of the Siksika Nation, and founder of Soul of Miistaki, on a journey of self-discovery through the sport. Ayoungman set out to break down barriers to climbing, integrating Indigenous teachings and land-based learning into climbing clinics. The film, which premiered at the 2025 Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival and was produced by Kino Sum Productions, captures her work redefining what it means to be on the land. The second film, "Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man," is the centerpiece—a National Film Board of Canada feature that explores Indigenous masculinity through the lived experiences of twenty men and boys of the Siksika Nation.
Solway, whose Blackfoot name is Sinakson, is a filmmaker from Siksika Nation, a community about an hour's drive east of Calgary. His path to documentary was circuitous: he attended the Independent Indigenous Digital Filmmaking program at Capilano University in 2012, then earned a Bachelor of Communications from Mount Royal University in 2017. His breakthrough short "Indian Giver" screened internationally and landed on Amazon Prime Video, and his broadcast debut, "Intertribal," aired on CBC. He went on to direct "Kaatohkitopii (Kit-tay-kit-toe-pee): The Horse He Never Rode" for CBC in 2021, an episode of the docu-series "Stuff The British Stole," and "Amplify" for APTN, and he created "Tales From The Rez," a horror-comedy anthology series on APTN Lumi. He is also the founder of the Napi Collective, a grassroots filmmaking society based in Siksika Nation, and has been recognized with Mount Royal University's Horizon Award and a spot on Avenue Magazine's Top 40 Under 40 list.
"Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man" was a long labor of love. Solway spent four years, beginning in 2019, filming off and on—the equivalent of about ninety days of shooting—with his camera kept in the trunk of his car so it was always ready when he returned home to visit family. He worked alone, serving as director, cinematographer, and sound recordist, with no crew. The result is a cinema-verité portrait that unfolds without talking-head interviews or voice-over narration, letting the camera observe the everyday lives of the men and boys of Siksika Nation—fathers, sons, artists, athletes, and DJs. There are scenes of children capturing frogs in jars.
One of those unscripted moments became a signature of the film. Roughly ten minutes in, a group of children captures frogs, and when one of the creatures becomes distressed, a boy breaks the fourth wall, looking straight at the camera and asking, "Does anyone know how to do frog CPR?" before pointing at Solway and demanding, "Stop filming and help us!" The boy was Solway's own nephew. It is a moment that captures the intimacy Solway was after. "I wanted it to feel like you are a part of the community and you are a part of that inner circle," he told the Calgary Herald. "That is the response I've heard from people who have watched it, that they felt like they were experiencing things from the inside."
For Solway, the film is also a deliberate act of narrative sovereignty. "I think when it comes to native people, for so long we've been studied and picked apart and projected upon in an anthropological point of view," he said. "There is almost this cold relationship between the subject and the observer. That's not the way I wanted to make this film. I think this is also a statement and a testament to Indigenous narrative sovereignty, the idea that we can own our own stories and also own the way we tell our stories." The film also challenges colonial stereotypes, offering a rare insider perspective on what it means to be an Indigenous man today.
The film has traveled far beyond the prairies. It debuted at the Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival in Toronto in 2025, where it earned Solway the Jean-Marc Vallée DGC Discovery Award from the Directors Guild of Canada. It went on to win the Audience Choice Feature Film Award at imagineNATIVE, Best of Festival and Best Feature Documentary at the Yorkton Film Festival, and the APTN Indigenous Spirit Award at the Gimli Film Festival, and it received an honourable mention for the Canadian Documentary Feature Award at an international festival. The film is now available to stream for free on the National Film Board's platforms.
The Banff Centre screening brings both films home to the mountains that figure so prominently in them. On a September night in Banff, under the stars, that story will unfold once more.