Who's behind the camera

Artless Collective is a film and digital media studio in Yellowknife, led by Pablo Saravanja, with a collective of crew and co-conspirators across the North.

From documentaries and creative films to live events and new media, we tell the North's stories: its people, its cultures and its land.

Pablo Saravanja in a red toque and life jacket, checking his phone on a small boat in the fog, beside a 360-degree camera rig on a pole.

Pablo Saravanja

Pablo co-founded Artless Collective and sets its direction: what it makes, who it makes it with, and where it's going. Born and raised in Yellowknife, he grew up on American blockbusters and wanted to make films from a young age. He studied photojournalism at the Western Academy of Photography, then documentary filmmaking at the Gulf Islands Film and Television School in 2008, and set up Artless Media to make it a business.

He co-wrote and co-directed Conibear, a horror short shot on a trapline near Hay River that screened at Clermont-Ferrand, the BFI London Film Festival and L'Étrange Festival in Paris.

The work he cares about most is northern and Indigenous stories, made with the communities they belong to and shown well beyond the North.

I feel a duty to capture and tell our own stories from a Northerner's perspective.

Where it started

Artless Collective came out of two Yellowknife companies: Pablo's Artless Media and Jay Bulckaert's Collective 9, merged into one.

From 2012 to 2020, Artless also ran Dead North, a northern horror-film challenge and festival: around 220 films in eight years, dozens of which went on to screen at other festivals, including imagineNATIVE and Fantasia. Conibear was made for it.

How we work

  • With permission. Cultural work goes on this site only with the client's and the community's consent, and it's credited the way they want.
  • Everyone credited. Every person who works on a film is in its credits, by name and role.
  • Northern crew first. Shoots are crewed from the North wherever the work allows.

Why there's a collective

Artless once had to turn down a production because there wasn't enough experienced crew in the North to make it. So it started training crew of its own.

That network is the collective: northern camera operators, sound recordists, editors, drone pilots and more, credited on the work they make with us. Bigger shoots get a crew that lives here.

Join the crew list

Got a story to tell?

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