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Eva

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Eva Grant

Eva is a bilingual filmmaker operating at the intersection of queer and BIPOC storytelling. She is an enrolled member of the St'át'imc First Nation, and is also of mixed South and West Asian, and European ancestry.

She studied literature and philosophy at Stanford University, and after graduating with Honors, gigged in Sundance’s feature development program while co-writing and co-producing the CBC Radio adaptation of the acclaimed Indigenous graphic novel, This Place: 150 Years Retold.

With support from the CMPA, Eva then apprenticed at Eagle Vision, writing for Snapchat, the History Channel, and serving as the associate producer on the Madison Thomas-directed biopic Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry it on, which premiered at TIFF 2022.

She is a BANFF Spark Fellow, an alumna of the BIPOC TV and Film episodic writers lab and one of this year’s ReelWorld Emerging 20.

She is the creator of Degrees of Separation (with co-producers Fae Pictures), a dark comedy web series which won the TransMedia Zone’s Power Pitch Competition and is funded by the IPF and CMF.

She is now in pre-production for her first short film, with funding from TELUS STORYHIVE and Creative BC, and just wrapped a 5-episode directing block in Northern Ontario for season 2 of Couleurs du Nord, an acclaimed Francophone children’s show.

Project Description

Degrees of Separation

DEGREES OF SEPARATION is a character-driven dark comedy Indigiheist with academic sensibilities.

Season 1 is the story of Delphine Purcell, a 26-year-old Indigenous PhD candidate from the Interior of British Columbia, who assembles a rag-tag team to reclaim her ancestor’s remains in the most daring dupe their university has seen since accidentally hiring a Pretendian in 2002. Delphine and her team quickly realize they aren’t the only ones interested in her Ancestor, and they must work together if they want to outsmart the White Saviours and Collectors who have been drawn to the community like vultures, ready to pick the bones clean.

Until 2019 universities across British Columbia actively collected, stored, and studied Indigenous remains. This is not ancient history! And even now, change is slow to come, bogged down by administration and bureaucracy. Our heroes have all been victimized by the cruelties, redundancies, and oversights of systems designed at best to erase them, and they are eager to write their own history not in the margins but on the front page. 

The past is political, and everyone has a stake: how it’s told, when it’s told, and who gets to profit from the telling. Over six episodes, Delphine builds her team and puts together her heist… only to discover that the man standing in her way, is calling himself her relative. Is Dr. Jonathan Doran a Pretendian, White Saviour, Collector, or “Something Else”? All Delphine knows is she is in a desperate race against time to retrieve the remains before he whisks them off to his lab at the University of British Columbia, never to be seen again.

Indigenous people are not artifacts. But we do belong in academies, universities.. and museums (in front of the glass, not behind it!). We also belong on your screens.Stories of hope are not absent of pain, and the wounds of our stolen family members run deep through Indigenous community. But laughter is good medicine. It can heal and transform these moments of trauma, much the way our heroes seek to transform the pain of their past into a powerful act of resistance. Dark comedy - tart but sweet - is the perfect vehicle to tell this story of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.