VIFF 2022 film review: Vancouver International Film Festival opener Bones of Crows as powerful as it is emotionally gutting
Dene/Métis writer, director, and producer Marie Clements’s feature tells a Cree woman’s harrowing life story, inspired by true events
Bones of Crows.
Vancouver International Film Festival runs at various venues from September 29 to October 9
Bones of Crows
At VIFF opening gala on September 29 at 6 pm and October 4 at 9 pm at the Centre for the Performing Arts
Inspired by true events, Bones of Crows covers vast ground, literally and figuratively, in its telling of the life story of a Cree woman named Aline Spears.
It travels forward and backward through time, from 1800s Turtle Crossing in Manitoba (where the Brandon Residential School took Indigenous children from their homes to assimilate them into colonial settler society) to the Vatican in 2009 (where a delegation of First Nations representatives from Canada met with Pope Benedict XVI) and many places in between. To be clear, the film by Dene/Métis writer, director, and producer Marie Clements (Red Snow, The Road Forward) is difficult to watch. And that’s exactly why it needs to be seen. (The film contains scenes that may be triggering to some viewers, especially those who have experienced harm, abuse, violence, and/or intergenerational trauma due to colonial practices.)
Spears is portrayed at different ages by Summer Testawich, Grace Dove, and Carla Rae. Her early years with her closely knit family are joyful; they sing and dance together, and she adores playing the piano. Then she and her siblings are taken from home by local authorities, her parents broken, aghast. (As Spears’s mom and dad, Michelle Thrush and Glen Gould offer gutting emotion.) The children each have different experiences at residential school, all of them horrific. Clements gives viewers a vivid sense of the kind of physical, mental, and emotional torment Indigenous children endured at the institutions, without resorting to unnecessarily graphic depictions of abuse.
Spears enrolls in the Canadian military. Her Cree language, just one element of Indigenous culture that the government was hellbent on eradicating, proved to be a coveted strategic advantage. Playing Spears as a young woman who goes on to marry and have children, Dove carries the film, exuding tremendous poise under immense pain.
Bones of Crows takes some time to find its footing; cuts at the top to establish different times and places initially feel somewhat jarring. Once it slides into pure storytelling, however, it is engrossing. Some scenes toward the end are documentary-like; Gail Maurice is especially powerful in her role accompanying the elder Spears (Carla-Rae) to the Vatican. As members of the Catholic church, Rémy Girard and Patrick Barrow both succeed in conveying absolute cruelty.
Legendary Indigenous director Alanis Obomsawin has a cameo. Among the notable local artists who make appearances are Margo Kane, founder of Full Circle: First Nations Performance; and musician Jesse Zubot, who composed Bones of Crows’ haunting score with Wayne Lavallee. Imbued with symbolism throughout, the film is gorgeously shot by Vince Arvidson, who captures the big Prairie sky and flaxen fields in all their golden glory. An unsettling film, so to speak, and a vital one.
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