INDIGENOUS LOVE STORY
Red Snow the latest of proud stories making it to the Canadian big screen
The Inuit don’t have 10,000 words for snow. But it’s such a lovely notion that even Gwich’in teenager Dylan and his Inuit cousin Asana can’t resist falling into the mythology of it in Marie Clements’s feature directing debut.
Alas, they also can’t help falling for one another, a taboo that leads to the Red Snow of the title as this Romeo and Juliet are forcefully separated by their families. This is already a gripping story, but it’s merely the framing device for a bigger tale, in which a-few-years-older Dylan (Asivak Koostachin) finds himself taken prisoner by the Taliban while on patrol in Afghanistan with the Canadian Army.
His captor, also the cousin of his local translator (played by Shafin Karim), doesn’t realize at first that Dylan is Indigenous. He starts by calling him American, and is amazed that he has a “Red Indian” in his clutches, just like from the movies. He enthuses: “Deep down we always wanted to be the Indians!”
Clements references both the mythology and reality of the Indigenous. There’s a scene in which Dylan chooses to answer questions only in the Gwich’in language, while his interlocutor barks at him to speak English; the comparison to residential schooling is there to be recognized.
Alas, much of the time the movie stays too talky for its own good, hammering home points that might be better told glancingly, and falling into such clichéd war-movie dialogue as: “I should have killed you when I had the chance.” And when Dylan makes a break for freedom, the almost Terminator-esque: “We should go if we want to live.”
But these are minor quibbles for a strong first feature. Red Snow is just the latest in a series of proudly Indigenous stories making their way to screens; stay tuned for Blood Quantum, set opening across Canada on March 27. There are 10,000 more waiting to be told, I’m certain, and that’s no myth. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm