SUBSCRIBE

Get new posts by email:

How to Use this Blog

BOOZHOO! We've amassed tons of information and important history on this blog since 2010. If you have a keyword, use the search box below. Also check out the reference section above. If you have a question or need help searching, use the contact form at the bottom of the blog.



We want you to use BOOKSHOP! (the editor will earn a small amount of money or commission. (we thank you) (that is our disclaimer statement)

This is a blog. It is not a peer-reviewed journal, not a sponsored publication... WE DO NOT HAVE ADS or earn MONEY from this website. The ideas, news and thoughts posted are sourced… or written by the editor or contributors.

EMAIL ME: tracelara@pm.me (outlook email is gone) ALMOST THREE MILLION VISITORS!

SEARCH

Wednesday, September 6, 2023

FILM: Rustic Oracle

Rustic Oracle is the equally heart-wrenching and heartwarming MMIWG drama every Canadian needs to see | Sonia Boileau's moving film follows a mother and daughter coping with grief and reparing their relationship

Still frame from the film Rustic Oracle. Lake Delisle and McKenzie Deer Robinson holding dandelions.
Lake Delisle as Ivy (left) and McKenzie Deer Robinson as Heather in Rustic Oracle. (Nish Media)

This is part of a series of essays in response to our recent project CBC Arts Presents: The 50 Greatest Films Directed by Canadians. We asked writers to choose a Canadian-directed film that they believe should have been included — particularly ones that fill the representational gaps in Canada's film history — and tell us why it deserves to be there.

There has been an incredible boom of Indigenous filmmaking in Canada in the last decade; three of the five Indigenous films on CBC's list The 50 Greatest Films Directed by Canadians were debut feature films that were made in the last decade. (Jeff Barnaby's Rhymes for Young Ghouls would even make my list of the best films in the history of cinema.) But many of the films that have come out of this boom have struggled to find the audience they deserve, often for lack of a marketing budget.

There are many low-budget, lower-profile movies made by Indigenous filmmakers in the last few years that are must-watches — films like Zoe Leigh Hopkins' Run Woman Run (2021), Loretta Scott Todd's Monkey Beach (2020), and Kim O'Bomsawin's Call Me Human (2020). 

And there's no greater example of this than Sonia Bonspille Boileau's Rustic Oracle, an exemplary, heart-wrenching and heartwarming film that needs to be seen by every Canadian.

Rustic Oracle is the best fiction feature film I've seen that addresses the national tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG). It's also a touching, sensitive story of a grieving family — a young Mohawk girl losing her innocence as she discovers the cruelty of the adult and settler world, and an estranged mother and daughter finding their way back to each other.

Set in the late 1990s, the film follows eight-year-old Ivy (Lake Delisle) and her mother Susan (Carmen Moore) as they head on a road trip in search of Ivy's 18-year-old sister Heather (McKenzie Deer Robinson), who disappeared without a trace. When the settler police service meets Susan with openly racist comments and indifference about solving the case, she has no choice but to look for her daughter herself, with Ivy in tow.

The film is told from Ivy's perspective as an adult (played by the great Devery Jacobs) looking back at her childhood and piecing together the meaning of her memories. As a child, Ivy is never fully privy to everything that's happening. As a child, she also doesn't understand everything she actually does see and hear. Important conversations are always happening in another room, usually when adults think she isn't listening — even though she often is.

Still frame from the film Rustic Oracle. Carmen Moore has a grave look on her face as she holds Lake Delisle.
Carmen Moore as Susan holding Lake Delisle as Ivy in Rustic Oracle. (Nish Media)

In an early scene in the film, we watch Ivy tiptoe out of her bedroom at night, having awoken to the sounds of adult voices in the kitchen: her mother's and a police officer's. She tentatively moves through the shadows to listen to what they're discussing in the harsh fluorescent light of the kitchen. It's a perfect metaphor for what happens to Ivy in the film: she leaves the safe spaces of childhood (her dark bedroom) where she is physically and metaphorically protected from the harsh realities of the adult world. And she does so when the adults aren't watching; they can't stop her, and she doesn't really want them to either. 

Boileau is incredibly attentive to blocking and framing; Ivy regularly crosses physical thresholds that also stand in for metaphorical ones. Throughout the film, the camera is close to Ivy; much of the time, Susan is at the back of the frame, as if unreachable, in another world from Ivy.

Susan's emotional distance is not for want of caring — it's because she cares too much. She's doing everything she can to keep her fear and anxieties about Heather's disappearance to herself. But it often means she's not attentive to Ivy's emotional needs, becoming standoffish and short. The film tracks the pair as they move closer and closer to one another in the frame, partly thanks to the forced proximity of sharing a car and a hotel room, which mirrors their slowly increasing emotional closeness. 

Still frame from the film Rustic Oracle. Lake Delisle smiles slightly as she looks out the window in the front seat of a car, with Carmen Moore focused intently ahead as she drives.
Lake Delisle as Ivy (left) and Carmen Moore as Susan in Rustic Oracle. (Nish Media)

Although Rustic Oracle deals with the aftermath of incredibly tragic and traumatic events, the film itself remains hopeful. Boileau makes time for a scene at a cafe where Ivy and Carmen play tic tac toe and end up in stitches, a reminder of the deep love between mother and daughter. We meet the community of women who support Ivy and Carmen on their journey, from Carmen's best friend in Ottawa, who gives Ivy affection when Susan can't, to a woman at the friendship centre in Montreal who aids their search.

And there's the narrative that bookends the film: an adult Ivy telling this story in voiceover for her daughter, also named Heather, who reminds her of her sister daily, and to whom Ivy gives the warmth that we watched Carmen learn to show.

Still frame from the film Rustic Oracle. Wide shot of Lake Deliscle riding her bike.
Lake Delisle as Ivy in Rustic Oracle. (Nish Media)

Rustic Oracle isn't strictly about the indifference of the settler world to Indigenous trauma, but it's baked into the film's grammar and structure. The road trip is only necessary because the police won't do their job. The people who provide Ivy and Carmen with support tend to be Indigenous people, not settlers, while Ivy's discovery of the cruel adult world coincides with a road trip off the reserve and into settler spaces.

The film is realistic about colonialism, but not confrontational, focusing instead on asking settler audiences to empathize with the characters. We feel their extremely justified frustrations with settler institutions and racism — but mostly, we're invested in their relationships. And with the final title card, the film encourages us to stay invested in the stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Watch Rustic Oracle for free on CBC Gem.

 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please: Share your reaction, your thoughts, and your opinions. Be passionate, be unapologetic. Offensive remarks will not be published. We are getting more and more spam. Comments will be monitored.
Use the comment form at the bottom of this website which is private and sent direct to Trace.


Happy Visitors!

Blog Archive

Featured Post

Theft of Tribal Lands

This ascendancy and its accompanying tragedy were exposed in a report written in 1924 by Lakota activist Zitkala-Sa, a.k.a. Gertrude Simmon...


Wilfred Buck Tells The Story Of Mista Muskwa

WRITTEN BY HUMANS!

WRITTEN BY HUMANS!

Most READ Posts

Bookshop

You are not alone

You are not alone

To Veronica Brown

Veronica, we adult adoptees are thinking of you today and every day. We will be here when you need us. Your journey in the adopted life has begun, nothing can revoke that now, the damage cannot be undone. Be courageous, you have what no adoptee before you has had; a strong group of adult adoptees who know your story, who are behind you and will always be so.

Diane Tells His Name


click photo

60s Scoop Survivors Legal Support

GO HERE: https://www.gluckstein.com/sixties-scoop-survivors

Lost Birds on Al Jazeera Fault Lines

Lost Birds on Al Jazeera Fault Lines
click to read and listen about Trace, Diane, Julie and Suzie

ADOPTION TRUTH

As the single largest unregulated industry in the United States, adoption is viewed as a benevolent action that results in the formation of “forever families.”
The truth is that it is a very lucrative business with a known sales pitch. With profits last estimated at over $1.44 billion dollars a year, mothers who consider adoption for their babies need to be very aware that all of this promotion clouds the facts and only though independent research can they get an accurate account of what life might be like for both them and their child after signing the adoption paperwork.


click THE COUNT 2024 for the ADOPTEE SURVEY

NEW MEMOIR

Original Birth Certificate Map in the USA

Google Followers


back up blog (click)