Five years ago, Tamara Podemski got heaps of notice and won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for her terrific performance in Sterlin Harjo’s Four Sheets to the Wind. A graduate of Toronto’s prestigious and highly competitive Claude Watson School for the Performing Arts (Sarah Polley was a classmate), Pademski’s strikingly lovely and multi-talented; with her Sundance breakthrough, she seemed on the verge of the sort of breakthrough that can happen for a young actress when she gets noticed at Sundance. Poised for a career launch, she relocated to LA; she was getting Oscar buzz, she got an Independent Spirit Award nomination. By all rights her trajectory should have been straight up from there. But instead … not much happened for her after that, at least in Hollywood.

A multidisciplinary artist, Podemski kept her head focused on other things, primarily her music (she led the Los Angeles band Spirit Nation, and has released solo work as well) and theater ( Maureen in the Broadway cast of Rent, Hippolyta and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Toronto’s Shakespeare in High Park, among other things). But thus far, success in Hollywood has eluded her, much as it long has another Native American actress, Misty Upham, whose turn in the Oscar-winning Frozen River popped at Sundance a year later, garnering her plenty of adulation and a Spirit nod, but a strikingly similar lack of offers (though it should be noted that things are maybe finally looking better for Upham, who’s lately having a significant career revival, having recently been cast in a flurry of roles in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy Picard, and August: Osage County).

Is it mere coincidence that two Native American actresses came out of Sundance accolades and didn’t see considerable career boosts off that? Consider this list of actresses whose careers, in part, were launched by Sundance success: Vera Farmiga. Amy Adams. Carey Mulligan. Jennifer Lawrence. Jessica Chastain. Jess Weixler (with whom Podemski shared the Special Jury nod). Felicity Jones. Brit Marling. Elizabeth Olsen. All have been able to leverage their Sundance success to keep getting more work, and even Oscar love.

Why is it so hard for non-white actresses to find the kind of post-Sundance Hollywood success that seems to be a given for their lighter-skinned counterparts? And why do Native American actresses, in particular, tend to only get offered roles in stories that are specifically “Native American,” while white actresses aren’t, as a general rule, relegated to parts that are defined by whatever their cultural heritage may be? (For that matter, Podemski’s only half-Native anyhow; her mother is Ojibway and her father’s Israeli.) Podemski and I chatted about this over lunch the other day here at TIFF.

“With Misty (Upham), she’s had it even harder because she looks Native, her skin is darker than mine,” Podemski noted. “But I don’t even look Native specifically … they just don’t seem to know what to do with me, where to put me. Asian? Latino? Indian?”

This isn’t generally an issue when it comes to theater, Podemski says. “With stage, it’s just all about the performance, the talent, not about how you look. Actually, success because of looks would be really frowned upon in theater. It’s very different. ” Hollywood, she notes, is much more concerned with knowing what box to put you in, and how people will “relate” to you. And Native Americans aren’t really a huge demographic for the movie industry. “Only 4% of Canadians are Native,” she says. “We were pretty much obliterated, we’re a very small group. So we’re really supportive of each other as a community of artists.”

Five years after the Sundance debut that first brought her name to attention in the industry, Podemski now finds herself at Toronto with her first feature film since Sundance 2007, the quiet, well-crafted coming-of-age story The Lesser Blessed, in which she stars opposite Benjamin Bratt as a single mother whose teenage son wrestles with the guilt of a tragic secret. Podemski says that she’s been told she looks much older and plainer in the film than she really is, which she seems to find amusing, noting that they just wanted her character to look natural and not overly made up. “Nobody knows what real women look like anymore,” she says. “The billboards and ads define this male fantasy of what a woman has to be. And all the makeup and the marketing, this drive to sell products, distorts what women really are, what we look like underneath.”

The Lesser Blessed is a smaller film, driven more by well-written and compelling characters than huge star power. It’s the kind of film that can get lost at a fest like TIFF; it’s also the kind of film that feels like it would play very well at Sundance, where it might be able to garner more attention — hopefully the kind of attention that, this time, might actually have an impact on Podemski getting more offers for the kind of serious, smart films she can really shine in. But Hollywood is fickle and shallow, and has narrow views on what a female star must be and look like, and Podemski seems, if nothing else, resigned to that. If the movie offers continue to be sparse, she’ll just keep focused on her successful theater career, her music, her impending marriage and perhaps kids, and perhaps the occasional smart indie fare that comes along.

Podemski radiates this sense of calm, focused energy, and comes off as a very grounded person who knows herself and is determined to succeed on her own terms, with or without Hollywood on her side. She may not be an “It Girl” in spite of those Sundance accolades five years ago, but she seems to have found something better and more sustaining: the peace that comes with not allowing others do define who you are, or what you’re worth. Here’s hoping, though, that Hollywood finally might finally recognize what a terrific talent she is, and give her more reasons to shine on the big screen.

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