Award-winning documentary about Boushie opens in Winnipeg

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This article was published 03/07/2019 (2630 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Three years ago, on a summer day in 2016, 22-year-old Colten Boushie of the Cree Red Pheasant First Nation died from a gunshot to the head after entering Gerald Stanley’s rural property with his friends.

In Canada, the case became a flashpoint after Stanley was acquitted at trial, bringing to the forefront of the national consciousness the ongoing violence against Indigenous people and a justice system unwilling or unable to confront that issue.

That subject is the crux of the documentary nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up from filmmaker Tasha Hubbard, which follows the trial and its aftermath.

The film especially focuses on members of Boushie’s family, who took the case to the Ottawa corridors of power and ultimately to the United Nations, where they challenged Canada’s justice system in front of the international community.

The film premièred at Hot Docs in April, where it won the award for best Canadian feature documentary.

As a filmmaker, the Saskatoon-based Hubbard touched on the subject before in her 2004 film Two Worlds Colliding, about the freezing death of an Indigenous man at the hands of Saskatchewan police. In 2017, Hubbard made Birth of a Family, a film about four First Nations siblings, separated by the ’60s Scoop and reunited decades later. The latter film was inspired by Hubbard’s own familial experience, being raised by adoptive parents and ultimately reuniting with 10 siblings by the time she turned 22.

nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up screens at Cinematheque this weekend and Wednesday, July 10.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca