Rustic Oracle
2019 | 101 minutes | Canada
Director: Sonia Bonspille Boileau
Writers: Sonia Bonspille Boileau
Languages: English
American Indian Film Festival, Best Actress, Lake Delisle, 2019
American Indian Film Festival, Best Supporting Actress, Carmen Moore, 2019
While not based on a singular true story, Rustic Oracle tells a story that is too familiar to too many indigenous families. Mohawk filmmaker Sonia Boileau endeavours to connect the statistics (indigenous women represent one-quarter of Canada’s missing and murdered cases) to the heartbreak and struggle of the loved ones left behind.
When Susan’s teenage daughter, Heather, doesn’t come home from school one day, she and her 8 year old daughter, Ivy (an impressive debut performance by Lake Delisle), are left confused, frustrated, and broken. Unsatisfied with the police’s efforts, Susan leaves town to follow a lead, with Ivy in tow.
Experiencing her mother’s pain, the investigation, and discovery of new leads through Ivy’s eyes, takes the viewer on this journey from the oft-unconsidered perspective. Although Ivy seems to know more than anyone else, having observed Heather more than anyone realized and through her seemingly prophetic dreams, she is often left out and left feeling helpless.
As the film follows Ivy, the viewer, too, is put just outside the police interviews and grown-up talks. But she’s not so left out that she’s completely protected from her mother’s pain, and some loss of innocence. Ivy is learning, in the worst way, that sometimes people leave even when you want them to stay. Susan and Ivy may have lost Heather, but they will never lose hope.
- Tish Chambers
Screenings
THURSDAY, MARCH 26
8:45PM
Stay after the screening for a directors Q&A
Presented in partnership with
Preceded by the short film
Directors in attendance
Caribou in the Archive
At the heart of this personal found footage film are the enigmatic events that led to saving an important piece of family history from being lost forever. Rustic VHS home video of a Cree woman hunting caribou is combined with NFB films of northern Manitoba from the 1940s-70s, commenting on what becomes part of official history and archives, and what does not.
Preceding Rustic Oracle, a film which chronicles an unresolved, traumatic family loss, Caribou in the Archives explores long-term reverberations of absence, touching on themes of impermanence, memory, and coping with the march of time.
Sonia Bonspille Boileau
Jennifer Dysart