In a significant accolade for Canberra-raised film director-producer Sophie Barksdale, it has been announced at an event held simultaneously in Denver and Oklahoma that her film, Who She Is, has won a Heartland Emmy Award.

The Heartland, a chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences which hosts the Emmys, was formed in 1986, to honour work for audiences in Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

Who She Is, winning in the documentary-cultural category, is a 37-minute film using striking animation by Jonathan Thunder, and first-person storytelling that brings to life lives of four women in Wyoming caught in the “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women” epidemic in the US.

“There are things we don’t talk about… we go missing, or are murdered at disproportionate rates. We become numbers… Then even the numbers disappear. But we are people,” one of the women says.

Barksdale is the daughter of noted Canberra composer Jim Cotter and teacher-librarian Julie Gardner. Educated at Orana Steiner school and Hawker College, where she studied drama, she once told me: “I think of film as just an extension of drama.”

Although she has been the producer and development associate for Caldera Productions in Lander, Wyoming, for some years after moving there with her American husband Scott, this is her directorial debut film, co-directed and produced with Northern Arapaho filmmaker Jordan Dresser.

Over many years, Arksdale worked for the National Gallery of Victoria, Screen Ireland and various film festivals in the US, Australia and Ireland.

Since moving to Wyoming, she has co-produced the historical documentary, The State of Equality, chronicling Wyoming’s role in the Women’s Suffrage movement, and another documentary, Home From School: The Children of Carlisle, both with Caldera Productions.