APTN developing Mohawk Girls

From a media release: 

APTN greenlights development of comedy series Mohawk Girls 

Rezolution Pictures, the 2011 Peabody Award-winning company that brought Reel Injun to worldwide audiences, is pleased to annouce that APTN has greenlit the development of the first season of Mohawk Girls.

Mohawk Girls is a half hour dramatic comedy about four sexy twenty-somethings trying to figure out what it means to be a modern day Mohawk woman. But with their parents, friends, community, and even the garbage man having an opinion, it’s an impossible task.Created and directed by Gemini Award winner Tracey Deer, Mohawk Girls will be executive produced by Tracey Deer and Cynthia Knight, the series showrunner.

Executive producers and producers for Rezolution Pictures are Catherine Bainbridge, Christina Fon, Linda Ludwick and Ernest Webb.“From the creator to the cast, this series represents a new wave in Aboriginal talent,” says Bainbridge, who is confident that the series has universal appeal: “The series is about dealing with cultural obligations, social pressures, and deciding who you want to be as an adult. Those issues resonate with people from every ethnicity and background.”

The Mohawk Girls cast features Kaniehtiio Horn (18 to Life, The Trotsky), Kyle Nobess (Todd And The Book Of Pure Evil, Cashing In), Rachelle White Wind (Moccasin Flats, Elijah). Also featured are veteran actor Glen Gould (Cashing In, Da Vinci’s City Hall), Ashley Michaels (Tornado Valley, North of 60), and newcomers Brittany LeBorgne, Heather White and Maika Harper.

 The pilot for Mohawk Girls, shot in 2010, was selected during the 2010 Cannes Film Festival to be a finalist in the first-ever International Pilots Competition at the Banff World Television Festival. It is the second acclaimed comedy from Rezolution Pictures, which won the 2008 CFTPA Indie Award for Best Comedy Series for Moose TV, starring Adam Beach, Nathaniel Arcand, Jennifer Podemski, and directed by Tim Southam.

Mohawk Girls was inspired by Tracey Deer’s 2005 feature-length documentary of the same name, about the trials and tribulations of three teenage girls growing up on the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake. This Rezolution Pictures/NFB co-produced film received the Alanis Obomsawin Best Documentary Award at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. Honours for Tracey Deer also include the Gemini Award for best writing and the Canada Award for her 2008 Rezolution Pictures/NFB documentary Club Native.