Tanya Talaga & Michelle Derosier | Canada | 2021
46 min | Partial Subtitles | CC Available
Co-presented by CFRU 93.3 FM
Spirit to Soar, Mashkawi-manidoo bimaadiziwin, is a one-hour documentary that examines the hard truths around the deaths of the seven students, truths the northern city of Thunder Bay and the country of Canada, have long ignored: Racism kills, especially when it presents itself as indifference.
Spirit to Soar is a closer look at what has happened in the wake of the inquest into the student's deaths, of how families and communities have struggled to carry on while pursuing justice for their loved ones and equity for First Nations People, and, it looks at Talaga’s own journey of trying to make sense of her role here.
At its heart, this film is a story of the strength and bravery First Nations youth face every single day, when they walk out the front door and head to high school in a country that has tried to erase them. We are still here and thriving.
DIRECTOR BIOS
Tanya Talaga
Author, public speaker, producer, director, journalist and storyteller. Tanya Talaga’s mother’s family is from Fort William First Nation and her father was Polish-Canadian.
For more than 20 years, she was a journalist at the Toronto Star covering everything from health to education, investigations and Queen’s Park. She’s been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism and been part of teams that won two National Newspaper Awards for Project of the Year.
Her first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, is a national bestseller, winning the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction.
Talaga founded Makwa Creative Inc., a production company focused on amplifying Indigenous voices through documentary films, TV and podcasts
Michelle Derosier
Michelle is Anishinaabe from Migisi Sahgaigan First Nation in Treaty 3 Territory in Northwestern Ontario. She is a mother, grandmother, artist, activist and filmmaker. Michelle has always lived and practiced in the north and has been making films for nearly 15 years. She has screened internationally at Sundance, Traverse City and ImagineNATIVE, to name a few. Her first short animation, the Grandfather Drum, was selected to screen at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
Her short documentary Audrey's Story premiered at the 2020 ImagineNATIVE Film Festival. Michelle is working on a new documentary feature.
