Award-winning film to premiere on demand Nov. 17
By Rick Garrick
KANESATAKE MOHAWK TERRITORY — Rustic Oracle, an award-winning Nish Media film about a missing Indigenous teen told through the eyes of her eight-year-old sister, will premiere on Apple TV, Bell on Demand, Videotron on Demand and Vimeo on Demand on Nov. 17. The film premiered at the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival and has since been recognized with 26 awards at 14 national and international festivals.
“With the on demand release, people can watch it in the comfort of their homes,” says Sonia Bonspille Boileau, writer/director of Rustic Oracle, co-owner of Nish Media and Kanesatake citizen. “It had a really nice festival [run] and I’m really happy for what it achieved. The response was pretty overwhelming — a lot of people are very touched by the end of the film.”
The film tells the story of the young sister as she accompanies her mother on a road trip with the hopes of finding her older sister, who had suddenly disappeared from their First Nation community.
“For me, it was really important that the film wasn’t too dark or too heavy, which I know is almost impossible when you’re talking about a missing Indigenous girl, like a teenager,” Boileau says. “I wanted the film to feel like there was light and there was love and there was hope — by using the [young sister] as the main character, it is a lot easier to convey all those things. I wanted to highlight the resilience and the strength of mothers in our communities and that was an important theme in the film.”
Boileau says her goal was to encourage the audience to feel empathy for and to relate to the main characters.
“By creating characters that other people can relate to as well even though they are rooted in an Indigenous community and Indigenous culture, I feel like you can create those bridges for better understanding,” Boileau says.
Boileau adds that the film aims to ensure that the fear and helplessness felt by many families across the country are not drowned by the politics, data and buzzwords.
“It is easy to forget that each ‘stolen sister’ is exactly that – someone’s sister, daughter, niece, cousin or best friend.”
Jason Brennan, producer of Rustic Oracle, president and co-owner of Nish Media and Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg citizen, says the main point in making the film was to take it beyond the statistics on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
“We felt it was important to bring the story back down to the human element,” Brennan says. “That is what has brought everyone together in terms of watching the film is that we were able to do that — it’s a mom and daughter story about a tragedy.”
Brennan says he and Boileau, who is his spouse, had talked about doing the project for “a long time.”
“We had done another film about five years ago in French called Le dep, but Le dep was a little bit of a prep for us to be able to do Rustic Oracle,” Brennan says. “We cut our teeth with our first film, so on our second go-around we were better equipped to tell this story.”
Rustic Oracle was shot in Kanesatake Mohawk Territory and set in the late 1990s. It features Carmen Moore as the missing teen’s mother, Lake Kahentawaks Delisle as the young sister, Mckenzie Kahnekaroroks Deer as the missing teen, and Margo Kane as the grandmother, as well as Kevin Parent, Alex Rice, Melissa Toussaint, Richard Jutras, and Brittany LeBorgne.