I watched this film as a part of the Manhattan Shorts series over thirty hours ago, and it has stuck with me in the way that the other nine have not. It is a simple film, as is the nature of shorts, but the limitation does not make them incapable of being profound. On the contrary, when your canvas is ten minutes, you have time for one big idea. Thus, the IMDB plot summary pretty much tells everything that happens in the movie.
This type of movie, with an aboriginal Elder (in this case a First Nations Elder) is almost required to (attempt to) imbue the audience with some message. I have spent much of the time since trying to figure out what that message is. Surely a movie would not be made that is a response to the coverage of the Nick Sandmann incident complaining that we give Elders too much authority (in much the same way that families of the "9/11 Victims" were accorded special status to weigh in on how to prosecute the "War on Terror"), and yet I've been unable to come to any other conclusion. Even if such a movie could be made, there is simply no way that it would become part of a festival, so I must be mistaken, but I can't see how. My hypothesis is that the message may be akin to one espoused by W. P. Kinsela in his Silas Ermineskin stories which is to say that there are many First Nations who disagree strongly with what they see as the hypocrisy and corruption of the chiefs/elders.
A final note: if Larissa Corriveau is the mother of Nina Corriveau, which I have no way of knowing, then it would make the latter Metis, and therefore be much more likely to have a strong personal connection to the message. By all means, watch this movie and attempt to decode it. In the end, it was very frustrating for me.
