Cinema
Where the Spirit Lives
Bruce Pittman · 1989
Synopsis
Alberta, 1937. Komi, a thirteen-year-old Kainai girl, and her little brother Pita are taken from their family by an Indian Affairs agent and sent to a residential school run by a religious order. They are renamed Amelia and Abraham, and beaten if they speak their language. Komi refuses to give up who she is. A sympathetic young teacher, Kathleen, takes her under her protection, learns words of her language from her and begins to see the brutality of the institution.
Context
The screenplay is by Keith Ross Leckie and the music by Buffy Sainte-Marie. The film cost about two million six hundred thousand dollars; it was broadcast on Radio-Canada television in October 1989, then on American public television the following year. Michelle St. John plays Komi, and Ann-Marie MacDonald the schoolteacher. The story concerns the residential school system in which Indigenous children in Canada were forcibly placed.
Who it is for
A little over an hour and a half, in English; a television film about Indigenous residential schools, seen through a child and her schoolteacher.
Prizes and reception
Gemini Awards for best TV movie, best actress (Michelle St. John) and supporting actress (Ann-Marie MacDonald); audience award at the Vancouver festival.
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