A critically acclaimed film which raises key questions about racism within Canada’s judicial system opens Thursday night in Saskatoon.
nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up examines the shooting death of Colten Boushie, subsequent trial of Gerald Stanley and its aftermath.
In 2018, an all-white jury acquitted Stanley of all charges in the fatal shooting of the 22-year-old Cree man, including manslaughter.
Filmmaker Tasha Hubbard says she was compelled to make the documentary shortly after hearing about Boushie’s death on Stanley’s farm in August 2016.
“I had started to think about what happened,” she says. “For the event itself and what the family was going through but also I was thinking about it in the historical context and then I was thinking about it looking at my son and my nephew, who I had with me at the time, thinking about what this would mean for them.”
Hubbard says the film was originally intended to be a much smaller project that would essentially end with Stanley’s trial but everything changed when the jury found Stanley not guilty on all charges.
Aside from examining the shooting, trial and aftermath, the documentary also looks at Canada’s history of colonialism and Hubbard’s own adoption into a non-Indigenous family.
The filmmaker says she also wanted to challenge the negative stereotype that had been painted of Boushie by both Stanley’s defence team and media during the trial and instead talk to people who knew him to find out what type of person he really was.
“When I started the film, I asked people from Red Pheasant (Cree Nation, where Boushie was from) what was he really like? And everyone, ‘He was a nice young man, so helpful.” That’s what he was known for, showing up unasked to help. And so, I wanted to make sure that was part of the narrative of the film.”
In the first weeks following its release, the documentary is garnering strong reviews.
It was chosen as Best Canadian Feature Documentary at this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto and the Colin Low Award for Canadian Documentary at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver.
Aside from Saskatoon, nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up is scheduled to have screenings in Regina, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto and Sudbury.
Hubbard says she hopes by bringing the story of how the system treated Colten Boushie to a much larger audience outside of Saskatchewan, it will open the way for positive change.
“Well, I hope that people who watch the film join in the family’s call for a royal commission to look at the structural racism that’s embedded in the justice system and, for that matter, in all Canadian structures.”
The film is co-produced by Downstream Documentary Productions and the National Film Board of Canada.
Other works by Tasha Hubbard include Two Worlds Colliding and Birth of a Family.
(PHOTO: Debbie Baptiste, left, and Colten Boushie, right. Photo courtesy National Film Board of Canada.)