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Stay Puft
06-07-2019, 03:18 PM
NÎPAWISTAMÂSOWIN: WE WILL STAND UP
Dir. Tasha Hubbard

https://i.imgur.com/c6civW9.jpg

IMDb page (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10238816/)

Stay Puft
06-07-2019, 04:13 PM
This was the opening night film for Hot Docs. I missed it at the fest but it's currently in general release now in Toronto. I can see why it was picked as the Hot Docs opener: it's timely (the case is only a year old or so), politically relevant (the report on missing and murdered Indigenous women was already underway, and the completed report was handed in to the government between this movie premiering and hitting the local theatres) and important (forcing Canada to confront its historical, political, cultural ugliness, which is now also playing out in our media because people treat the word "genocide" like a hot potato).

It mostly follows the Boushie family through the aftermath of Colten's murder and the trial, and their journey to Ottawa and the UN to fight for political change. Hubbard also inserts herself and her own family into it, in order to create a larger context (I had mixed feelings about this approach) and it also uses animated sequences to give a brief overview of Canadian history, e.g. the Indian Act, residential schools, etc. The film does a decent job tracing the threads that lead from historical colonial violence to a group of white jurors in 2018 giving a thumbs up to a white farmer shooting an Indigenous man in the head.

Not the most impactful documentary, surprisingly given the subject matter (I thought it could have gone in a lot harder in places, maybe that's just me), but still a yay.