Ninan Auassat: We, the Children is the closing film of the RIDM documentary festival Nov. 20 to Dec. 1
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“I always found young people from Indigenous communities to be very resourceful, brilliant and lucid,” O’Bomsawin told The Gazette recently. “Even if their life is harder compared to privileged kids, they had a lot of lived experience and a lot to tell. They were certainly not a reflection of what I would hear about when I would come back to Montreal and listen to the radio and read the papers, which talked much more about drug consumption, the dropout rate and young girls getting pregnant very early (in Indigenous communities).
“I found we were always speaking very negatively of them, whereas my feeling toward them was quite the opposite; so I decided to let them speak for themselves.”
“It’s an incredible honour, I was very touched,” O’Bomsawin said, noting that the spotlight given to her film “says people are ready, that they want to go toward and to meet First Nations in a general way, but also that they want to hear from these kids.”
There are almost no adults in O’Bomsawin’s film. At one point, we see a mother in the kitchen in the background, a father playing guitar or three boys making a fuss when their grandmother comes to visit. Other than that, we are plunged into the world of her subjects.
“In the communities, what’s different with these youths is they have great freedom,” she said. “Kids will leave the house, go play and come back. They live in a state of controlled chaos.”
Which meant O’Bomsawin dealt with little to no red tape during the filming process.
“From the moment the kids said yes, the parents said yes,” she noted. “We would show up and say, ‘What are we doing today?’ We would take off (with the kids), and the parents were fine.”
O’Bomsawin’s subjects include four-year-old Legend Makesh and her three older sisters, Sage, 22, Jade, 20, and Rain, 14, who care for and guide her through life in Whapmagoostui, Quebec’s northernmost Cree community; Matapew Ottawa, 12, his younger brother Zachary and their cousin Isaac Verreault Lambert, 11, who have adventures and ponder things on the Atikamekw reserve of Manawan; and best friends Alyssa Picoutlaigan, 17, and Monique Benjamin Hervieux, contending with the encroaching realities of the real world in the Innu community of Pessamit.
Along the way, serious issues are broached, from illness to alcoholism, suicide, violence, abuse, pregnancy and inter-generational trauma. Through it all, we witness these young people finding their way with dignity, resilience and humour, and with help from one another.
“I wanted to communicate a message of hope, especially for these young Indigenous people who were going to see themselves on screen,” O’Bomsawin explained. “I wanted to say: ‘You are beautiful. I find you beautiful, and the people who see you find you beautiful.’ It’s unanimous, everywhere I go to show the film, people say: ‘Wow, these kids are extraordinary. I want to spend time with them.’
“I wanted to give them confidence and show them they have as much value as any other kid they could envy. I also wanted to tell the world: ‘Stop seeing us as failures. We’re so much more.’”
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Ninan Auassat: We, the Children is part of RIDM’s Magnus Isacsson competition for Canadian films that display a strong social conscience. Also in the category are:
