Ever been on thin ice before? Or any kind of ice for that matter? Ever gone skating on a frozen pond? It was a common sight in animated and printed fiction made in Canada, but then I got traumatized from an episode of Bob The Builder regarding the potential danger (but seriously, how heavy are scarecrows supposed to be?). Well, the point is, the phrase ‘on thin ice’ really makes you think about what happens when you literally are on thin ice. And what better way to show the truth then through Jonathan B Elliot’s new film, Little Deer?
Starring Isla Grant and Kiera Van Der Ploeg as two young Indigenous girls who escape Residential School and brave the cold, they take a journey along the landscape to reconnect with their families for a few days over the Christmas season. But nobody said it would be easy, especially as they try to cross a frozen pond. As I mentioned.
This film brings a new focus to both students at the school and survivors of the school after having gone years later. It was all about friendship and finding community and relationships and relying on people in the darkest of times. Chances are when you deal with experiences similar to these, the only way you can heal is with community and support systems, so it was daunting for the crew. Even more so was the process of making the story as it went through a lot of trial and error with perspectives. Soon, it became a great story about a budding friendship between these two girls escaping the Residential School and eventually finding hope. But it was mainly inspired by Jonathan’s cousin who would run away from his residential school to celebrate Christmas with his mother, a habit that lasted for 5 years.
HNMAG: Little Deer is really intense. Was it tough to make such a production with a scary story about a Residential school?
Jonathan B Elliot: Yeah, it was a huge responsibility because I’m from Six Nations and this is the community that orders the very first residential school that was established in Canada which was Mohawk Institute Residential School. My community has had a long history with this particular school and I’ve had generations of my family, my grandparents, great grandparents, attending the school and had really terrible experiences there to the point where they moved my father, uncles, and aunts away from the community so they did not have to attend the schools. We’ve had multiple generations of our family go there and growing up on the reserve you can tell that every single person who was there has had some sort of experience that’s usually negative and has impacted their families. When I started making the project, I was working with a group of survivors who went there from the Kennedy years of 1940 to when it closed in 1969. Everyone knew the weight of what we wanted to talk about was huge to our community and we all realized that it was a huge level of responsibility to do it properly there.
Jonathan explained when you’re using a lot of heavy subject matter like this short film, you have to find a way to tell a story that doesn’t traumatize people too much. He really cared about ensuring authentic without too much tragedy, to respect the survivors he worked with.
HNMAG: And you collected perspectives too. Was it difficult combining them together?
Jonathan B Elliot: Yeah it was, I worked with this group of survivors for over a year and a half literally just talking to them and interviewing them, going out for coffee/breakfast with them. For me, when it’s coming to telling a story like this, I wanted everything to be lead by them, and true to their experiences. I wanted to do things that were respectful and not forcing things, it takes as long as it takes to make a community lead project and specifically when you’re dealing with people’s pain, you don’t want to rush things. Over the whole course of development it was great because the process went with trusting me more, and something I started observing was a lot of them had wildly different experiences at the school. There were commonalities in between them, and there were always stories of running away from the school. It was born out of this feeling just to be free from there even if just for a few hours or a few days. It was also that when you’re in a situation like that as kids at a school, the only way you can actually get through them is by making friends who understand what you’re going through. While they necessarily didn’t talk about it in death at the time since they were kids, you didn’t need to at the time to understand. They just knew people were going to help them make it through when they needed it. Once we really discovered that was a common theme, that became the natural story and theme of the movie.
HNMAG: It looked pretty risky shooting that one scene on the ice in the dark. How did you pull it off?
Jonathan B Elliot: (laughs) Yeah, that gave us a lot of grief for a very long time. The backbone of the whole story is these kids are trying to run away from the school to get back to their families for Christmas and that’s based on my cousin’s story. It’s about a 4 hour journey to get from Mohawk Institute to home for him. At the time, there was a ferry that was operating to get across the river. In wintertime, it wasn’t operating as the river would freeze. Whenever he got to the frozen river, he would have to cross it to get to his mother’s property right on the other side. I felt that was a scene that I couldn’t imagine a better way to demonstrate a drive of these kids to get home than by putting themselves in mortal danger. At every stage of pre-production I felt we had to shoot it in the dead of winter. It would be really hard but I really wanted to shoot a scene of them crossing the ice. Once I discovered one that was perfect, it required the most planning because it took place at night. When you’re shooting a film, you need to feel the danger so lighting it was going to be an issue. We had to get a big 80-foot scissor lift in there to light it with all the lights we had in there. But then also when you have two kids, a camera operator AND a safety person to spot them, walking across the ice you need safety and rescue teams there to be able to rescue people from falling in the ice. We needed a team of at least 8 people, and a 30 person crew out there. The logistics of pulling that scene off, wasn’t our hardest day but because we planned so much we didn’t encounter so many issues. It’s the scenes that you don’t plan so much that end up being difficult when you thought they’d be simple. That night we were all biting at the tooth.
HNMAG: How did you manage to find such amazing locations?
Jonathan B Elliot: Thankfully, we had an amazing team on board so our amazing locations manager from Six Nations was able to find the spots we were looking for. We kept coming up against how the real Grand River doesn’t freeze that often anymore. We had to shoot somewhere that looked like a 70 foot river, but was more contained in a practical way. Ponds out in Brand County offered us fish spotting grounds, that freeze over because of the chemicals in them. We scoured a lot of different locations for the house and our production coordinator Lauren Hill had a family friend named Sandy whose house was built in the 1910s and it’s an old retro-fitted barn style house. When we went in, I thought it was perfect. It looked exactly like it was from the 40s. None of the locations that we saw quite matched that, and thankfully the way the house was designed, you could shoot a scene in the living room and the living room would have a totally different feel from being in the kitchen. We needed the living room for the Grandfather’s house, and the kitchen for the mother’s house so we had the same location and shot very different scenes in the exact same house. It was a bit of movie magic but finding that was huge and obviously also we shot in the actual Mohawk Institute so Woodland Cultural Centre are the ones who own that building and they’re the ones that are restoring it to make it a living museum so we were communicating with them since the idea of the project happened. I reached out to them to get archival photos of what it looked like and things were totally different. There was wood paneling going halfway up the wall, and now it’s very modernized. We wanted things to be as accurate as they could be so our production designer had the great idea to do faux wood paneling halfway up the wall to make it as era-appropriate as it could be. But it’s really taped on cardboard that looks so real. (laughs) The rest of the locations were actual places that my cousin would run away to. We followed his route home, the train tracks, the river front at the park.
One of the bigger issues Jonathan found himself dealing with was how one frozen riverfront had a snow snake tournament going on, and they had to scramble to find a new location. It was a huge reset, but luckily a PA named Darren Thomas said his family lived across the river and offered their place as a shooting location. Turns out that’s also where Jonathan’s cousin and his mother used to live as well. How about that? On the last day of shooting even.
HNMAG: A lot of your crew consisted of people from Six Nations. How did you manage to round them all up?
Jonathan B Elliot: My producer Jessie Anthony is an amazing filmmaker. She’s been living out of Vancouver for a long time but her family’s from Six Nations, so I brought her on board, she brought on Lauren Hill our production coordinator, and they brought on our locations manager Taysha Fuller. From there, we realized our community of Six Nations had a really good number of writer/directors and producers, but there isn’t a whole hell of a lot of actual crew members for different departments. I realized this was an opportunity to bring people onto the project for those who have a little less experience or those who haven’t worked in film at all. To give them a project that is meaningful to the community and that we can provide those training opportunities for inexperienced crew to work on a production and learn about the film world and working in the film industry is like. I think the thing we felt most satisfied at the end was these people who had never worked in the film industry before said how much they loved it at the end of the project. They wanted to continue to pursue a career in the industry. Over half our crew were Indigenous filmmakers so we were thrilled.
HNMAG: And will you be getting together for more projects on the horizon? Are they working on anything else you have going on?
Jonathan B Elliot: Jesse made a short film that she wrote and directed a few months after Little Deer and was able to bring a lot of the same crew members on for the shoot. A lot of the same locals on board, and now both her and I are developing more projects that we’re going to be shooting on the Reserve. We want to keep growing and giving people more opportunities so we’re both very adamant in continuing to pursue increasing the number of people from Six Nations working in the film industry.
HNMAG: You have a history of directing and making a variety of projects, have you had a great experience with telling stories or was it a struggle for you?
Jonathan B Elliot: I think it’s a struggle at first because you’re always measuring yourself against other people that you look up to. I think the biggest struggle obviously for any storyteller is finding out what kind of stories you want to be telling and what are you trying to say to people. For me, through my storytelling I realized that I loved the tone of stories about my community that are about finding positive and hopeful ways to look at things. As opposed to be presenting very pessimistic and traumatic experiences the goal for me is, if I’m going to tell a story that is heavy and deals with heavy subject matter then I want to be able to explore it realistically, and authentically and respectfully but not to leave people there. I want to show them that’s not all we are, as Indigenous people. We’re not just what we suffered, we’re also strong, and how we’ve dealt with it.
HNMAG: You told a lot of stories about Indigenous culture. Are there other kinds of stories you would like to tell too?
Jonathan B Elliot: Yeah, I think it’s always interesting about how you want to explore different genres about things, but I really would love to do both comedy and horror. I think they’re both extremes you could go to, I think that horror presents an opportunity to explore the darkness of humanity. The best horror movies for me are the ones that have that spin where you view this darkness but then you see people overcoming it and being able move past these horrors in a meaningful way. Like comedy too, it’s all life-affirming and all about putting people in these outlandish situations. For comedy it’s all about me showing people you can connect to because in the end, you’re laughing with them.
HNMAG: How have people been reacting to the premiere of Little Deer? Have you gotten lots of good buzz about it?
Jonathan B Elliot: Yeah, we were so happy that there was a media festival that was organized on Six Nations by January Marie Rogers and Jackson Twobears. January and I are very familiar with each other and she asked if there was a project to present this year and I was like “I can’t think of a better one to present than our film to our community”. We had our premiere to our community at Chiefswood Park, it was a very intimate screening, there was about maybe 75 people there predominantly community members from the reserve. We had the survivors who worked on the film with me, and developed the story with me. We had crew members and even people from outside the community so it was the best case scenario of all the types of people I wanted to make the movie for. We played the film and everybody reacted how I thought they would. Afterwards, we had a really great conversation with people who weren’t involved in the film, but they had their own experiences with their residential school, and were very moved and felt we had presented things very respectfully and accurately.
HNMAG: And you have other projects happening too. Is it difficult to balance everything out?
Jonathan B Elliot: You kind of have the inspiration strike at the most inopportune of times, so I have all these moments for the key story of the feature I want to be making. It is trouble, you always have to compartmentalize things a little bit, but now that this project is complete and doing its festival run we’re going to promote it. My headspace is really clear to start working on the feature now.
HNMAG: Can you say what the feature is about?
Jonathan B Elliot: It’s about two siblings who realize that their mother might’ve had a curse put on her by a witch. Witchcraft in Indigenous communities is not widely talked about but it’s known there’s good medicine and bad medicine, and there’s people who wield the good medicine. All the adults in the movie are convinced she’s suffering from a really bad case of mental health issues. Bipolar disorder and Schizophrenia. There’s this balance of how kids view the world vs how adults view the world and exploring this idea of mental health and how it’s very stigmatized in our community. It’s also about how families go through some of the worst parts in their life but learn how to heal. It is a horror, and goes into some dark kind of possession areas.
HNMAG: What’s something you are really looking forward to making in the future?
Jonathan B Elliot: I would love to make a comedy TV series. I have a few different ideas floating around about that, and thankfully some of them are starting to develop. I would love to try making something that is truly lighthearted and enjoyed by everybody. Difficult issues that they can kind of shut off when they see it in the drama. But through comedy you can explore what those things really mean and get people on board with experiences of characters.
Yes, this film tells quite a story, and Jonathan is telling quite some stories himself. I can’t wait to see what else comes for him or what other awards come to this film and his other works. Seriously, I saw the list of festivals it got awards and nominated at, and that list was LONG. He’ll probably get twice as much with everything else he’s making currently.