‘Power lies in perspective’
‘Night Raiders’ a first for New Zealand-Canada Indigenous co-operation
Danis Goulet still remembers the casting call that changed her life.
She wasn’t trying out for a part. She was doing the hiring.
It was 2002, and Goulet had recently moved to Toronto from her native Saskatchewan to work as a casting co-ordinator. She’d gotten her start in 1998 on “Big Bear”, an Indigenous-led, made-inSaskatchewan production directed by Meti filmmaker Gil Cardinal.
“I didn’t realize how rare it was to have something helmed by an Indigenous person that was such a large-scale project at the time,” she says.
In 2002, Goulet was helping to cast “a huge U.S. television pilot” that needed an Indigenous actress to play what she drily calls “a Pocahontas type.” (Goulet is Cree/Métis.) The part required the performer to sacrifice herself over a waterfall.
“I had to watch all these Indigenous women come into the room — and I really respected them as actors — and they were literally silent, and then died. I sat in the chair and I just remember feeling so small and thinking: This is what we’re doing with these women, who have so much more to give, and so much talent? This is the role that they have to come out for?
“And I came to the realization that we had to make our own movies. Because the power really lies in the perspective of the person telling the story, and the actors can only take it so far. If you didn’t have a script that gave the actor something interesting to do, it could still be really problematic.”
Goulet left that meeting, signed up for a film workshop in New York, and made her first film, a seven-minute short called “Spin” that played at the Sundance film festival in 2004. There, she met a fellow Indigenous filmmaker from New Zealand, who had just shot a black-and-white short called “”. It was just his second film. He had released the first under his birth name, Taika Cohen. For this one, he chose to use his father’s last name, Waititi.
FIRST FEATURE FILM
Cut to 2020 Toronto. Goulet is putting the finishing touches on her first feature, “Night Raiders”, a CanadaNew Zealand Indigenous co-production, executive produced by Oscar-winner Waititi.
Actually, “finishing touches” might be a bit optimistic. The film is a science-fiction thriller set in a military-occupied North America, circa 2044. There are about 130 visual effects shots.
“We have definitely slowed down amidst the pandemic, so it really has changed the shape of our post-production schedule,” she notes. “At the same time, we were one of the lucky productions that had shot almost everything prior to the pandemic. So, all things considered, I feel pretty lucky.”
The original plan was to have the film ready for an autumn theatrical run. Goulet says she’s confident it will be complete by the end of the year, for whatever form cinema takes by then.
“Night Raiders” is one of a number of recent Indigenous genre productions. This year saw the streaming release of “Blood Quantum”, an Indigenous zombie horror from Mi’gmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby. Inuit director Nyla Innuksuk is working on Slash/Back, an alien invasion movie that Goulet describes as “’Attack the Block ‘but in the Far North.”
For her own movie, she says she was influenced by “Children of Men”.
“I felt at its core it had such a strong emotional truth,” she says of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 dystopic thriller. “I really love the alternate reality parts of it, but also that it felt like it was just one step beyond where we are now.”
She was also moved by what she saw on a research trip to the Standing Rock Reservation, which straddles North and South Dakota and was the site of an antipipeline protest in 2016. Goulet recalls that the camp was thousands strong, made of Indigenous bands from around the world.
“When you drove into Standing Rock, you would see the flags of hundreds of nations that were all standing in solidarity with the protest.”
But on the other side were helicopters, militarized vehicles, police snipers and more.
“That kind of violent presence that was there in the interest, not of human lives, but to protect industry, was really intense to witness,” she says. “It definitely fed into the images in the film. I feel like it was an important trip, not only to see what I could see, but to feel what I could feel there, and have it influence what I’m writing about.”
ABOUT THE FILM
In “Night Raiders”, a Cree woman in the dystopian future society must join an underground band of vigilantes to rescue her daughter from a state children’s academy. (Any resemblance to the residential school system is likely intentional.)
The film features a Maori character played by New Zealand’s Alex Tarrant. Goulet says she was careful to reach out to Maori screenwriters for assistance.
“In Indigenous communities we try to be really … careful of any portrayals that aren’t our own communities, because of the history of misrepresentation.”
The cast also includes Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, an Indigenous Canadian actress whose recent work includes both “Blood Quantum” and the drama “The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open”, which won the $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film prize from the Toronto Film Critics Association last year.
The crew also includes Ainsley Gardiner and Chelsea Winstanley, producers from New Zealand who have worked with Waititi throughout his career.