Charity Bradfield pictured in a poster for “The Land of Rock and Gold.”
A La Ronge woman and her son made their on-screen debut at home on Friday night in the La Ronge premiere of “The Land of Rock and Gold.”
The movie started making its way through the festival circuit earlier this fall. It has already received Los Angeles’ Red Nation Film Festival nominations for “best picture” and “outstanding actress for a lead role” for La Ronge woman Charity Bradfield’s first-ever acting role.
“All of it hasn’t really sunk in yet, even though there’s premieres all over it still hasn’t hit me,” Bradfield said in a phone interview before the premiere.
“The Land of Rock and Gold” was filmed last winter in the community, and featured untrained actors. One of the directors, Janine Windolph, is originally from La Ronge.
Bradfield has viewed the movie in bits and pieces, but Friday was the first time she viewed it in its entirety.
Bradfield said she got the role unintentionally. Her son Demitri McLeod had been auditioning and she was reading lines with him, but the producers kept “bugging me to do a couple lines.”
Now, Bradfield said she’s proud of her son for his work as one of the movie’s main characters.
“He just amazed me with memorizing the lines and the emotion that he performed. I know he’s a little performer at home but to see it in action is, like, wow,” she said.
Bradfield said acting was strange for her, since she’s used to her routine working at Robertson’s Trading Post, but it did feel like it came to her naturally.
“I think in my head, ‘okay what was this person feeling?’ And then all of a sudden it would come out,” she said.
She said the filmmakers asked Bradfield for input to make things more realistic, and they also did a lot of improvisation.
Now, she is simply excited to have seen the reactions of her community members at the premiere.
The La Ronge premiere was on Friday at the Churchill Community High School.