The Whistler Film Festival (WFF) will be honouring one of Canada's most prolific stars on Thursday (November 29).

Tantoo Cardinal—who is of Métis descent from Alberta, is currently based in Toronto, and has been previously based in Vancouver—has portrayed characters on screen and stage in Canada and the U.S. for almost five decades.

Among her credits are such notable feature films as Loyalties, Smoke Signals, Black Robe, Legends of the Fall, and Dances With Wolves, and Canadian TV series such as North of 60, Arctic Air, and Mohawk Girls.

She has starred in several of Vancouver filmmaker Carl Besssai's feature films, including Unnatural and Accidental, Mothers and Daughters, and Fathers and Sons.

Cardinal also has roles in the forthcoming releases Through Black Spruce, Don McKellar's cinematic adaptation of Joseph Boyden's novel, and The Grizzlies, Miranda de Pencier's drama about a group of Inuit students whose lives change after being introduced to lacrosse.  

The Toronto Film Critics Association announced on November 6 that Cardinal will receive the 2018 Technicolor Clyde Gilmour Award, which will enable her to give $50,000 in film services to a filmmaker of her choice.

The WFF will feature Cardinal on stage at the Maury Young Arts Centre (4335 Blackcomb Way, 4 p.m. on November 29) in an interview with George Stroumboulopoulos to cover a variety of topics, including her career, environmental activism, and the depiction of Indigenous women on screen.

Her appearance will be followed by a 6 p.m. screening of Falls Around Her. In this drama directed by Darlene Naponse, Cardinal portrays an Anishinaabe musician who returns home to northern Ontario but finds reconnecting with her past is more complicated than she anticipated.

The film will have a second screening on Sunday (December 2) as well.

Another Canadian actor being featured at WFF 2018 is Giacomo Giannotti.

This Italian Canadian actor has starred on TV series such as Grey's Anatomy, Reign, and Murdoch Mysteries, and will be featured on stage in a conversation about his career with Stroumboulopoulos on Saturday (November 1). Following the event, Natty Zavitz's feature romance-drama Acquainted, about former high school acquaintances (Giannotti and Laysla De Oliveira) who reunite and find themselves attracted to each other despite being in relationships with others, will have its world premiere at 7 p.m.

A second screening of the film will be held on Sunday (December 2).

Full details are available at the WFF website.