Alex Heeney reviews Darlene Naponse’s new film Stellar at TIFF, about two Indigenous strangers meeting at a bar on the night the world may be ending.
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In Darlene Naponse’s (Falls Around Her) new film, Stellar, an Indigenous woman (Elle-Máija Tailfeathers of Night Raiders, The Body Remembers When the World Broken Open) meets a handsome young Indigenous man (Braeden Clarke, Run Woman Run) at a bar, and they decide to chill there for the evening. It might be the end of the world as we know it, considering the storm brewing outside. The settlers are losing their minds, glimpsed only when they pop their head into the establishment with terror and warnings. Our protagonists, though, seem unfazed. To paraphrase Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby when talking about his film Blood Quantum, Indigenous people have already survived the apocalypse. Or as Cree Métis filmmaker Loretta Todd put it, “You can’t have survived colonialism and not be epic. I want you to feel our epicness.”
For Naponse’s characters, it’s less that their daily lives feel like the apocalypse. They still speak their language. They live in the city and dress well enough to suggest they aren’t living in poverty. But they also feel like they’ve already lost what’s most important: the ability to be on the land. Naponse regularly cuts between the characters talking or reminiscing to exquisite images of their homes, the land on the reserve. There’s the rushing water in the stream, the sounds of leaves rustling, the wildlife bringing it to life. For them, spending the night at a bar when the world is ending, doesn’t feel like a particularly uncommon night. They may have moved to the city to fight for their people and their land. But they’re not on their land so they feel like they could be anywhere.
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Based on Naponse’s own short story, the film is experimental and poetic and makes daring aesthetic choices. The outside world, for example, can only be glimpsed through the one window in the bar, which is clearly a green screen. Sometimes, it shows the storm outside. Sometimes, it brings us to the land the characters are missing. They may not be there, but they see it everywhere. It’s in their bones. The fact that we’re not really sure where they are is part of the point. This could be any Northern Ontario city, any place, because whatever it is, it’s not the land they long for. So they share cryptic stories and flirt. It’s not a conventional romance because they don’t necessarily expect to survive the night. But the graze of a hand has never been this sexy since Edith Wharton.
Darlene Naponse’s film Stellar is a sensory experience that doesn’t cater to settlers
The film Stellar is an overwhelming sensory experience in this specific (beautifully designed) bar, at this particular time, listening to the music on the jukebox these two characters have chosen. Loretta Todd might liken this to translating the oral tradition to the screen: “All these sensual experiences of that moment would help me return to that moment. That’s the genius of the oral tradition. It’s embedded, in song, dance, and ceremony, very rich sensual experiences in which the words are embedded.” As a settler, I feel like I’m getting a glimpse into a world rarely revealed to me.
I love that Stellar doesn’t even try to cater to settlers, as many Indigenous films in the past have been forced to. It expects you to understand why these characters are so blazé about the oncoming apocalypse — they’ve already survived one — and what it means that they’re speaking their own language to each other. Language revitalization in Indigenous communities has been hard-won after decades of cultural genocide via the residential “schools” system. The flip side is that it feels like a film for Indigenous people, a film that doesn’t bother to talk down to settlers or use our tropes. I worry that this will be lost on the mostly settler critics at TIFF, which could hurt the film’s prospects. But I also think it’s such a wonderful, radical thing to do.
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