Petie Chalifoux has a whole folder of rejections at home but she says, “you can’t give up. Accept the “no,” and keep moving forward. Never give up. Somebody out there is ready for your project, you just don’t know who until they see it.”
Petie runs a production company, Tohkapi Cinema, with her partner, Micheal Auger. Tohkapi is a Cree word meaning “Opening Eyes” and it’s a 100% owned and operated Indigenous company. Her hard work and her dedication to putting herself out there is bearing fruit. The project she worked on at the PSP, “Disappearing Moon,” has received development money and is currently being worked into a feature and a short. Petie and her team will be filming the short this summer, “and we continue to push for it to become a TV series.” Petie’s documentary, “Bella’s Story,” recently aired on APTN.
Looking back at her time with the PSP, Petie says she’s grateful to Sarah Dodd for holding a space for her to use her voice in the way Petie was taught, in a way that was respectful to her own culture. She adds, the most useful skill she came away with was “learning how to break a story.”