“It felt like extractive filmmaking at its finest,” says filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, a member of the Kainai First Nation and Sámi from Norway. They haven’t lived it… And reflected so clearly onscreen.” As outsiders, they are inevitably going to tell the story wrong because they don’t get it. Indigenous Filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: “It was very apparent that there were no Indigenous key creatives.

We are talking about a film reckoning with colonialism that has been adapted entirely by white key creatives (the main producers, director and writer), a set-up we could argue is narrative colonialism. There are others who, like me, were left a bit horrified. Indigenous audiences at screenings across the country have expressed how much the film has touched them. And Indian Horse stars Indigenous talent in front of the camera, including elders like Edna Manitowabi who have survived the residential school system and expressed pride during interviews and Q&As for having the chance to channel their pain into the film.īut while the film stirs up our discomfort by charting injustice, it ultimately feels detached, patched together and soulless – like so many television specials before it. The history is rarely, if ever, told in Canadian film, and I sincerely hope audiences get out and reckon with these past injustices. As played by Sladen Peltier, Forrest Goodluck and Ajuawak Kapashesit at different stages in his life, Saul becomes an against-all-odds hockey star, struggling with whether his gift for Canada’s national sport is a resilient stance in the face of colonization or a sign of assimilating to a dominant culture that will never see him as an equal.

The film follows Saul Indian Horse, a witness to and victim of multiple abuses in the residential school system, where his heritage is systematically stripped away. The uncomfortable question that I’m certainly not the first to ask is why Campanelli’s need to direct a story he previously knew nothing about is prioritized over the ambition of numerous Indigenous filmmakers who have been waiting for the opportunity to tell their stories. And I wrote an impassioned six-page email saying why I needed to direct it.” “I was shocked and angered and embarrassed to be a Canadian and not know about this. Campanelli explains his reaction to reading the late Richard Wagamese’s novel and Dennis Foon’s adapted screenplay.

In the Maclean’s story, director Stephen S. The film, landing in theatres this weekend after premiering at TIFF last fall, grapples with the horrors of Canada’s residential school history and the trauma inflicted on First Nations. In a story published in Maclean’s last month, a headline declared: “For Indigenous people, ‘Indian Horse’ is much more than a movie.”

Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese