Film’s comedy comes from ‘rich’ life on the rez




While movie theatres have been open to the public since Saturday, the Gimli Film Festival is proceeding with a mostly online festival, with one notable exception. The RBC Sunset Drive-In is a safe, socially distanced alternative to the usual beach screenings that have long made Gimli unique among film festivals.

This festival-within-a-festival kicks off Wednesday night with a movie that checks off many of the boxes one expects from drive-in fare. It’s a raucous comedy. It has con artists, a cache of hidden money, a loaded, adversarial romance, and even some supernatural elements.



Almost all of it is set on a British Columbia reserve, a place the movie’s hero, Hank Crow Eyes (Ajuawak Kapashesit), struggles to leave.

Indian Road Trip is partially lifted from the experience of its writer-director Allan Hopkins, who refers to himself as “a proud member of the N’quatqua First Nation,” located about 200 kilometres north of Vancouver.

Hopkins left the reserve to earn a communications degree at Simon Fraser University with a minor in film studies. He has spent years at the CTV Bell Media Aboriginal current events series First Story, first as a field producer and eventually as the senior producer.

“Mostly, this comes out of my own experiences and memories and impressions of when I was a young man living on the rez,” says Hopkins in a phone interview from Vancouver.

“I was always thinking about what my life was going to be, where was I going to go, what was I going to do,” he says. “Was I going to leave the people that I knew and loved, and leave the land I loved and go to the big city? Or was I going to stay there and have that life, which has its own sort of richness and excitement?”

The film is very much a portrait of the community, which Hank and his buddy Cody (Paul C. Grenier) are determined to leave, only to be waylaid by a mission to take the elder Hetta (Dale Hunter) on a trip to visit her dying sister so the two can finally make peace over a long-simmering conflict.

Hopkins says he was intent of capturing the “small-town vibe” on the reservation “where you know everybody. There’s some great comfort in that and I wanted to bring that feeling to the screen.

“It’s not all gloom and doom and darkness and pain on the rez,” he says. “There’s fantastic personalities. There’s great stories. There’s drama. There’s comedy. There’s magic. There’s everything that can give a very rich and a very full life.”

Some of the episodes of the film are lifted from his real experiences. For example, the beginning of the film sees Hank and Cody fleece a family of white tourists coming into the reserve on their way to a pow wow.

“That part is real,” Hopkins laughs. “My brother and my cousin actually did that. They earned a few bucks that way.”

He thinks he has captured some of the gender dynamics at play on the reservation too.

“The way the females are portrayed as being in control of the place, that kind of reflects the way it was,” he says. “And the guys are kind of scared of them. That’s taken out of real life.

“A lot of the personalities (in the movie) are compilations of people that I know, but I don’t think anybody from where I’m from is really going to recognize themselves. But it is very much like a love letter to those times and those people.”

Hopkins, who is currently at work on a more serious project set against a backdrop of residential schools, has no problem with the timing of this film’s release at Gimli at a time when the wounds of residential schools have been opened anew in recent weeks.

“Comedy is sort of a Trojan horse,” he says. “You do a bit of a comic take on things but you can slip in some of these serious issues and that is the power of fiction.”

He says the film mines the distinctive quality of Indigenous humour in the process.

“I think it varies from nation to nation but there are some underlying similarities,” he says. “It’s a little more self-deprecating and there’s a little more observational (humour).

“I think Indigenous people have an ability to laugh at themselves that may be lacking in other cultures. It brings a richness to the culture, but at the same time it’s also a bit of a survival technique.

“We can cry about it or we can laugh about it … so let’s laugh about it.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing

Randall King



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