Adam Garnet Jones is an Indigenous Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter.[1]
Adam Garnet Jones is an Indigenous Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter.[1]
Of Cree and Métis ancestry,[1] Jones grew up in Alberta and British Columbia.[2] Battling suicidal impulses in his early teens as he came to terms with being gay,[2] he recovered a sense of purpose by making short films and videos. Jones also identifies as Two-Spirit.
Brought on by his newfound creative outlet, Jones continued to make short films and videos and attended the Gulf Islands Film and Television School,[2] and subsequently moved to Toronto, Ontario to study film at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University).[2]
After graduating from Ryerson, his short film Cloudbreaker premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival,[2] and he coordinated a youth film and video program for Toronto's Inside Out Film and Video Festival.[3]
He made the short films A Small Thing, Wave a Red Flag and Liar, wrote an episode of the television series Cashing In, and was a writer and story editor on the television series Mohawk Girls.[4]
His feature film debut, Fire Song, premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.[5] Fire Song went on to pick up Audience Choice awards at four film festivals, including the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.
Jones' second film, Great Great Great, premiered at the Canadian Filmmakers' Festival in March 2017, where it won three of the festival's top awards for Best Feature, Best Screenplay and Best Performance. Great Great Great was released theatrically that same year.[6] At the 6th Canadian Screen Awards in 2018, Jones and Sarah Kolasky received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay.[7]
In 2018 he published his first young adult novel, an adaptation of Fire Song.[8] The novel was a finalist for the Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit and Métis Literature. In 2019, the novelization of Fire Song was chosen as the Bronze Medalist for Young Adult Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
Published in 2020, the book Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction features a short story by Jones titled "History of the New World." The piece dives into the dystopian future of the Earth and how native culture comes into the conversation of how humans should act in the face of global collapse.
Jones also works for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network as director of television content and special events.[9] Along with his work in film and media, Jones creates beadwork jewelry and runs an Etsy shop selling his work. His pieces have been used in the show Rutherford Falls.
