Fest flies on a smudge and a prayer

> BY JANET SMITH

Writing the movie River of Silence, local filmmaker and screenwriter Petie Chalifoux knew she wanted to capture a real Indigenous family’s pain over a missing woman.

Chalifoux has firsthand knowledge of that unrelenting anguish. As she and family members testified at the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, she lost her own grandmother to suspicious circumstances on a remote road near Lesser Slave Lake about 18 years ago. Her grandmother was never listed officially as murdered, despite a missing purse and cane, and many other irregularities at the crime scene.

River of Silence is not specifically about that tragedy, but is rather a careful melding of the many similar stories Chalifoux and her husband, director Michael Auger, collected from people over the years to cowrite the project. The film tracks the fallout after a young, well-adjusted Vancouver student named Tanis (Roseanne Supernault) goes missing during the long drive to her family’s reserve. The tragedy sends her supportive family—including her successful, art-gallery-running mother—into a spiral of suffering, as it fights for an investigation against an uninterested police force.

“The media has portrayed a lot of Indigenous women as women who put themselves at risk,” says Chalifoux, whose film gets its Canadian premiere at the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival on March 8 as part of a day of free screenings to mark International Women’s Day. She’s speaking to the Straight over the phone with Auger. “My grandmother wasn’t someone who put herself at risk. And by showing this young woman who’s in university and has a healthy family, you show that if it could happen to her it could happen to anyone. For me, it’s definitely about breaking down stereotypes. I knew I wanted to tell a story that could intrigue other people who don’t know what we’re going through.”

Auger, who, like Chalifoux, is of Cree background and from northern Alberta, adds that it’s just as important that the film features a supportive father who throws himself into finding his daughter.

“There are lots of families who are healthy,” Auger says, “and there are a lot who are still suffering because of the intergenerational effects of colonization and residential schools. For men, there’s been very much a campaign to vilify them so they get reduced to virtually nothing.”

The bulk of the film was shot in the wilderness near Merritt, and Auger’s atmospheric scenes of the forests, mountains, and rushing rivers allude to the duality of nature and larger themes about Mother Earth.

“In our story the land is both beautiful but also a place where she lost her life. It’s wrong,” Auger says. “For Indigenous people, the land isn’t a place to be afraid of. Now people look at land as something to go and do something briefly and take something from it. And Tanis lost her life in a safe and good place.”

The remote locations posed their challenges for the crew, of which half were from Capilano University’s Indigenous Independent Digital Filmmaking program and half from the same institution’s School of Motion Picture Arts. Chalifoux, who remembers being in the middle of studying for final exams for her third year at Cap U. during the shoot, says the tough conditions brought the intercultural crew together.

“Being out there in Merritt, in the mountains, there was no Wi-fi, no Instagram,” she recalls. “Filming along the river at Little Box Canyon, the roads were pretty steep and people had to haul gear up and down those mountains—and when it rained the road got really slick. But the elements really made us work as a single unit.”

Auger and Chalifoux witnessed an amazing camaraderie build between the Indigenous and non-indigenous crew members over the course of the two-week shoot. “A smudge and a prayer and a song began the day,” Chalifoux recalls, “and after two weeks you could see the barriers between people breaking.…by the end they understood the importance of the land and the prayers and the stories.”

A plea for wider cross-cultural understanding is at the heart of River of Silence, as it is for several other Indigenous offerings at the Women in Film festival, at the Vancity Theatre from Tuesday to next Sunday (March 6 to 11).

Doreen Manuel, a Secwepemc/ Ktunuxa First Nations filmmaker and instructor in the Indigenous Independent Digital Filmmaking program, will moderate a discussion on Indigenous moviemaking next Sunday. The same day, a program called The Last Walk will feature three short films made by the circumpolar Arctic Film Circle. On March 8, the B.C. short “Thirza Cuthand Is an Indian Within the Meaning of the Indian Act” explores mixed-race identity and colonial trauma.

River of Silence may be joining a burgeoning Indigenous filmmaking scene, but it also opens against the tumultuous backdrop of controversy over the not-guilty verdicts in the murder trials for Coulton Boushie and Tina Fontaine. Auger and Chalifoux see River of Silence as an ongoing call for action. They want to see the inquiry on missing and murdered Indigenous women succeed. Chalifoux says she’d also like to see more cellphone towers put up in the province’s North for those who get stranded on the road.

Auger points out: “We wouldn’t need cellphones if this wasn’t happening—if Indigenous women or young people weren’t seen as easy targets for people working out their darkness.”

River of Silence is a start, he adds. “One thing I would hope at the bottom line is that people watch this and see Indigenous families are real people—and they feel real pain.”

River of Silence

On the sonic level, Lila Downs’s 2 new album, Salón Lágrimas y Deseo, occupies a beautiful but not readily identifiable place. Have those ska horns been lifted from Kingston, Jamaica, circa 1964, or are they a somewhat Caribbeanized take on Mexican mariachi music? Is the singer channelling some Parisian chanteuse, or deploying contemporary pop-ballad moves, or can we detect a touch of Eartha Kitt in her purring confidences? The oompah rhythms of Tex-mex border music are softened and urbanized.

Downs is a cosmopolitan; of that there is no doubt. But when the Straight catches up to her in polyglot New York City, she quickly gives credit to her husband, songwriting collaborator, and saxophonist Paul Cohen for the new sophistication that can be heard on Salón Lágrimas y Deseo. In fact, she suggests, their music is set to acquire even richer depths by the time she and Cohen next head into the studio.

“He’s really into classical music lately,” Downs says fondly. “He’ll be like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s Schubert today! And then it’s Beethoven!’ So I think his references are becoming more classical in nature—and yet we have been fortunate to visit certain places, like the Balkans, and collaborate with the musicians there. We went to Slovenia, I remember, and Greece, and Macedonia, and now we find those genres part of our music as well.”

Look deeper into the meaning of the music, however, and you’ll see that it derives from situations closer to Downs’s home—or homes, as the case may be. The singer’s father was a Scottish-american professor at the University of Minnesota, while her mother was a Mexican singer of Mixtec descent; Downs spent her childhood in both Minneapolis and the Mexican state of Oaxaca. At the moment, however, neither place feels entirely safe to the 49-year-old singer, a situation reflected in her lyrics.

“Envidia”, for instance, sounds celebratory, with Jerzain Vargas’s virtuoso trumpet sketching out a Middle Eastern–inspired melody atop a driving party beat. But Downs’s words paint a darker and more complex picture: the song addresses both a lone woman’s resilience in the face of neglect, and the enduring presence of Indigenous culture—“lakota, Inca, Azteca, Mapuche, Maya”—even after centuries of colonization and, as the title suggests, envy. It also, Downs says, speaks to the worsening situation of women and minorities in Donald Trump’s USA.

“It’s really about this confrontational situation that’s going on,” Downs explains. “Feeling like you’re not even being seen as a human being, as a legitimate human being, is a difficult situation. Of course, it reminds me of the civil-rights movement, and I think that’s the moment that we’re in, in a certain way. So that’s what the song is really about: it’s about the notion of envy and jealousy and belonging and, I guess, fighting for respect.”

Lila Downs plays the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts next Saturday (March 10).