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Dead North Film Festival

An industry building engine Disguised as a festival

The original Dead North rating card: N, Northern. Under northern lights and accompanied by strange delights. Brutal radness, pervasive deadliness and some frostbite.
The rating card shown before every Dead North film · N, for Northern
8winters, 2013 to 2020
224films in this archive
9weeks to write, shoot and finish
−40shooting weather, some years
79Zombear winners

The dare

Before Rated‑N existed, a territory had to learn to make films.

In 2011 almost no films were being made in the Northwest Territories. The North was shot by fly-in crews and told in an outside voice. So in November 2011 Jay Bulckaert issued a dare: write, shoot and finish a genre film in the darkest weeks of a Northern winter. He called it Dead North. A few teams took the first dare. By 2020, forty-six did.

From 2012 to 2020 he ran it as its president, with Pablo Saravanja and Artless Collective. Teachers, trappers, nurses, heavy-equipment operators and teenagers became filmmakers. Films made at a snow castle on Great Slave Lake travelled to Fantasia, imagineNATIVE, Clermont-Ferrand, the Reykjavik International Film Festival, the Cannes Short Film Corner and the Banff Centre. VICE covered it in 2016.

What it really built was capacity: hundreds of Northerners who now know how to put a story on a screen. That is the ground Rated‑N stands on.

  1. 01North of 60. Anyone above the sixtieth parallel could enter, first-timers welcome.
  2. 02Nine weeks. Register in December, deliver in February.
  3. 03Ten minutes. Horror, science fiction or fantasy. Nothing else.
  4. 04Two secret elements. A line and a shot, revealed at registration.
  5. 05A poster and a trailer with every film.
  6. 06Every film that made the deadline played. The audience voted. The Zombear was the prize.
The ZombearHalf polar bear, half nightmare, all trophy.

The real Zombears · scanned in 3D

Pick one up. Turn it over.

The shieldDead North plaque, bear head and all.
The winged oneBat wings, rock base, bad attitude.

Drag to turn. Scanned from the real trophies.

The wall · 51 posters

Every film came with a poster, made by its filmmakers.

Hover to bring one to life. Click to play its film.Tap a poster to play its film.

Welcome to the Dead North Screening Room

Grab a seat.
You’ll only need the edge of it.

The whole Dead North catalogue is here: 220+ shorts made over eight winters north of 60, free, back to back, in the order you choose. Build your own show, look up anyone who made a film, or watch by community.

225 films · one screen · your call

The map · 18 communities

Made north of 60, and a little beyond. Every light is a community that made films for Dead North; the brighter it burns, the more films. ClickTap a light to show what it made.

Each film opens on the big screen with its synopsis, its credits and the Zombears it took home. The films and their ideas belong to the people who made them. The whole archive is on the Dead North YouTube channel.

Where they went

From a snow castle to a global audience.

Forty-plus Dead North films went on to other festivals: Fantasia, imagineNATIVE, Clermont-Ferrand, the BFI, the NYC Horror Film Festival, the Reykjavik International Film Festival (RIFF), the Cannes Short Film Corner and the Yukon Film Society’s best-of nights. Its short films have gone on to inspire multi‑million‑dollar feature films. In 2021 the Banff Centre invited a programme of nine Dead North films by and with Indigenous filmmakers. In 2020 the festival ran HyperBorea, a talent lab that pushed a select group of films toward the international market, and Rated N on Northwestel Community TV gave the films a second life on television.

Year one, 2013The first films played on a wall of snow, to a full house in parkas.
The hall fills up
The first Zombears, on a ledge of snow
Parkas on, lights down
On the snow castle stage
Winter Festival · Great Slave Lake · Yellowknife NWTYear one screened inside the Snowking snow castle. Every March the Snowking Winter Festival raises a castle of snow on the ice of Great Slave Lake. For one weekend in 2013 it became a cinema. The model is after the Snowking XXXI castle. Drag it to spin.Visit Snowking (opens in a new tab)

Most of all

Hundreds of everyday Northerners who froze their faces off.

225+original films in eight winters, first-timers and professionals side by side
Worldwidescreenings, from Fantasia to Banff to a snow castle on Great Slave Lake
Careersbegun: teachers, trappers, nurses and teenagers who now make films for a living
FeaturesDead North short films have gone on to inspire multi‑million‑dollar feature films

Dead North today

The festival becomes a creative lab.

Dead North ran for eight glorious years, from 2012 to 2020. Rated‑N grew out of it, and so did careers and feature films. The spirit pulses on: creativity + technology + community = mind-blowing results.

Now it is becoming a lab for hybrid filmmaking and creative experiments of every kind. Up here, doing more with less is not a slogan. Less is what the North has.

The North’s storytellers are few, but mighty. Most of them can light it, shoot it, cut it and build the set before lunch. The industry is thinner than it used to be: Statistics Canada counted about 30 film and video jobs in the NWT in 2010, and 19 in 2024. So these folks of all trades are doing what they always do, rising to it. Put creative AI in their workflow and a small Northern crew can put the same visuals on screen as a big one.

It reaches past film. A mobile game. An open world like micrOmega. Animation and visual effects. A web series from a wolverine’s perspective.

The story reigns. Collaboration and on set craft lead; generative tools help expand the vision and widen what a small Northern crew can create.

Got a visionary idea?
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