The producer and director of an acclaimed documentary about three teenage Mohawk girls growing up on a reserve in Canada is taking the concept to the next level.

Candadian blog TV, EH? posted a press release from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network announcing that Tracey Deer will executive produce a new television show about “four sexy twenty-somethings trying to figure out what it means to be a modern day Mohawk woman.”

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.

No word on when the project will begin shooting for the first season, but the release did mention that the cast has been selected.

The website Women Make Movies has more about the original Mohawk Girl documentary.

Jenna Cederberg

Tags: alanis obomsawin best documentary film, APTN, documentary, eh?, mohawk girls, Moose tv, rezolution pictures, tracey deer, tv