TJ Cuthand

Pre-contact, a Two Spirit person named Woman Dress travels the Plains, gathering and sharing stories. Featuring archival images and dramatized re-enactments, this film shares a Cuthand family oral story, honouring and respecting Woman Dress without imposing colonial binaries on them.

In 1995 when Thirza Cuthand was 16 she felt like the only lesbian at her Saskatoon high school. This turned out to be untrue, but the lack of visibility in her high school coupled with the lack of representation of queer teenagers in the 90's made her make her first video, a comedic short about teenage lesbian loneliness and trying to bribe classmates to come out with the promise of candy.

A love story about the history of an interracial family's ancestors and the lands they emigrated from and migrated to. It is also a personal story about being mixed race.

An original video diary documenting the director's efforts to have artificial insemination. Cuthand describes his desire to have children of his own and the difficult journey he must take to have them, a journey that is also closely tied to his membership in Canada's First Nations and thus to the question of preserving his indigenous culture.

A helpless maiden is tiring of her consensual S&M relationship with her lover, and "evil" queen. She wants to break up. An impassioned monologue in a dungeon with our heroine in wrist cuffs quickly becomes an emotionally messy ending in flames.

Super 8 footage layered with Sharpie marked lines and circles obscuring the image illustrates the story of the filmmaker’s experience with temporary episodes of migraine related blindness and her cousin’s self induced blindness later in life. Paralleling the experience of Blindness with Mental Illness, Cuthand deftly elucidates that any of us could lose any of our abilities at any time.

This video was made to talk about abuse in psychiatry, which I experienced in Montreal. However I chose to let others words explain my feelings on the topic. The visuals are recontextualized shots from The Miracle Worker, starring Patty Duke as Helen Keller. Patty Duke went on to develop bipolar disorder, like me. The main sound used in this video is from the radio emissions captured by the Cassini space probe from Saturn.

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2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com queers and indigenizes traditional dating site advertisements. Using a Butch NDN 'lavalife" lady (performed by director Thirza Cuthand), 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com seduces the viewer into 2 Spirit "snagging and shacking up" with suggestions of nearby pipeline protests to take your date to, and helpful elders who will matchmake you and tell off disrespectful suitors. It's the culturally appropriate website all single 2 Spirit people wish existed.

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Weaving together family narratives and current thoughts on the pandemic, the ethics of representation, and the nature of the sacred, Thirza Cuthand discusses a medicine bundle which was used to heal the artist’s great-great-grandfather from a Gatling gunshot wound in 1885, and her grandfather from the Spanish flu in 1918. In this film, Cuthand reflects on the ways that the bear cub spirit contained within the since-buried bundle has continued to protect her family from the trauma and diseases brought on by colonization.

Anhedonia doesn't play to the back of the church. It shoots directly to the point with poetry and images that evoke controversy in one mind set and passion in another. Depression and suicide are met head on with Cuthand's honesty. Anhedonia shocks people into opening their eyes to the source of the illness in the Aboriginal community. Statistics, split images, words and flesh meld together making this short film long on compassion, screaming out for help and recognition of the mentally ill's dream of someday having a normal life.

In the dark night of a prairie city, a vampire considers her future with a fetching mortal. But requiring blood for sustenance brings a host of problems to the relationship.

Middle-aged Theo documents life after starting hormones, as ongoing news headlines continue to underline and undermine ongoing trans rights.

TJ Cuthand and his mother Ruth Cuthand have a candid conversation about TJ’s last hospitalization for Bipolar Disorder in 2007. While TJ only knew his manic episode from the inside, Ruth had to deal with caregiving decisions and trying to find help. While they reminisce they also have to reckon with the feelings of animosity that arose between them during these events.

A girl with a bad habit of falling for older women befriends a boy lover. This video is an examination of relationships between adults and teenagers. It involves ice cream trucks and bowie knives.

Two Longform Lesbian Census takers poll their community to find out important statistics on tops, bottoms, and switches, butches and femmes, cats and dogs, how couples are planning to conceive their children, and more crucial lesbian data! Or they are just trying to get girlfriends!

A personal film about Canada's extraction industry and its detrimental effects on the land and Indigenous peoples. This film parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension Industry. As the filmmaker reviews her life and how these Industries have affected her, she also reflects on having her own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.

In The Lost Art of the Future, Cuthand talks about artists he has known who passed away while living with HIV/AIDS and the art he wishes he had been able to see them make if their lifetimes had been longer.

Reclamation is a documentary futurism short about three Indigenous survivors left behind on Earth after white people leave a destroyed planet behind for Mars. While seemingly dystopic, this film is filled with hope and humor and looks at potential solutions for current crises.