Mohawk actor shines on screen, behind camera

She's got three projects in the festival, two as an actress and and one as a director.

Not bad for a 23-year-old.

"That's actually a first for me," said the bubbly Jacobs, explaining that after her breakout role in the critically acclaimed drama, Rhymes for Young Ghouls, work was hard to come by.

"There were a lot of callbacks, a lot of almosts, jobs that had fallen through and so I'm just that much more appreciative of the work that I'm doing now and the fact that is all showing in one festival is just the icing on the cake."

She co-stars with Duane Howard of The Revenant fame in The Sun at Midnight, appears in The Land of Rock and Gold and makes her directorial debut in Stolen.

Jacobs is from the Mohawk reserve Kahnawake, Quebec and said she always had a love for acting as far back as she could remember. "I would steal my parents video camera at home and I would force my sister to tape me and I would direct these films and I would act in them."

She became part of her community's theatre group at seven-years-old, but didn't think acting was a viable career option. Instead, she went to college to become a counselor.

But soon the acting bug bit and she returned to making movies, both in front of and behind the camera and eventually her two journeys came together.

"My background in counseling and what I went to school for actually has a play in Stolen, in what I wrote about, which revolves around the topic of missing and murdered Indigenous women," she explained.