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The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
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Wikipedia article
'The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open' (Kwakwala: 'Malkwalamida uwine leoe yaxidixans nalax', , Blackfoot: 'Koistominno saakaisksinima ksaahkomm otsitsikowohpihpi') is a 2019 Canadian drama film directed by Elle-Mij Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn.
The film centres on a chance interaction between two Indigenous women of contrasting lived experience and socio-economic position, ila (Elle-Mij Tailfeathers) and Rosie (Violet Nelson), as they navigate the effects of intimate partner violence. The majority of the film consists of a single, continuous long take.
The film premiered at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival in the Generation program, and had its Canadian premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. It was nominated for six Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Motion Picture, and won three, including Best Director. In 2020 the film won the Toronto Film Critics Association's Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, Canada's most prestigious film award.
Plot
The film opens with a series of vignettes introducing Rosie, a young Kwakwakawakw woman, and ila (Blackfoot and Smi). Rosie is pregnant and living with her violent boyfriend and his mother. ila visits a doctor to have an IUD inserted. After her appointment ila encounters Rosie, battered and barefoot in the rain, having just fled her boyfriend, who is screaming at her down the street. ila, unsure of what to do, offers Rosie shelter in her nearby apartment.
Once inside, Rosie is reserved and hesitant to hand over her clothes to dry. While changing in the bathroom, she steals a bottle of ila's anxiety medication, and later her wallet. Rosie slowly opens up, revealing that she was recently phased out of foster care, but remains adamant they not call the police. ila insists they should at least find a women's shelter for Rosie to spend the night. She eventually agrees to consider going to a safe house.
On the way, Rosie becomes good-humoured, telling the cab driver she and ila are sisters, and that ila is on her way to enter in rehab for her drinking, much to ila's bemusement. She tells the story of their father dying, possibly mirroring her own truth. At Rosie's stop, ila secretly follows her into an apartment complex, and witnesses her exchanging the anxiety medication for cash. Back in the cab, ila quietly confronts Rosie over the drug exchange, who turns hostile and accuses ila of looking down on her. As they reach the safe house, ila refuses to go in with Rosie until she tells the truth. Rosie insists she was only selling, not using, and pays for the cab after ila realizes her wallet is gone.
The two are greeted by Cat (Charlie Hannah) and Sophie (Barbara Eve Harris). ila explains what happened, and Rosie details some of her boyfriend's abuse, but restates that she won't go the police, due to him being on bail, and her belief that they won't treat her with respect. She also does not wish to join her grandparents in Port Hardy, for fear of being judged as a young single mother. Sophie and Cat offer Rosie a room at the safe house for as long as she needs, and access to social services. After a moment alone with her unborn child in the bathroom, Rosie tells the others that she wants to return home to her boyfriend, downplaying the abuse she shared earlier, and insisting that he won't be angry if she returns right away. On the way out, Sophie assures the frustrated ila that it's normal for victims of abuse to need several tries before gaining the courage to leave their abuser, and gives ila money for the taxi.
ila and Rosie share a quiet ride back to Rosie's apartment. Rosie asks ila if she's mad at her. ila says she's not, and tells Rosie shell be a good mother. Rosie says ila will too. At the apartment, ila tearfully watches Rosie walk away before driving off as night falls over East Vancouver.
Production
The film's title comes from an essay by Billy-Ray Belcourt. The story is based on a personal experience of Elle-Mij Tailfeathers.
Production of the film involved an indigenous youth mentorship program, funded through Telus Storyhive, which placed 11 young First Nations filmmakers within each department as mentees.
Real-time transitioning technique
The directors initially intended for the film to play as one continuous, real-time shot in order to create a heightened state of immediacy for both the actors and the audience. When cinematographer Norm Li suggested shooting on 16 mm film, they were faced with an 11 minute limit due to the size of 16mm film magazines. To circumvent this, he orchestrated a system dubbed "Real-Time Transitioning" in which, at planned cut points, he would hand off the spent camera to an assistant, and be handed another to continue filming; the two shots would then be stitched together in editing. In total, 12 cut points are hidden for the final film. This also allowed the editor, Christian Siebenherz, to blend different takes together from the 5 days of shooting.Reception
Critical reception
The film was critically acclaimed upon release. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of , based on reviews, with an average rating of . The website's consensus reads, "'The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open' uses an encounter between two strangers as the catalyst for a thoughtful drama as poetic as its title." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 87 out of 100, based on 8 critics.Accolades
At TIFF, the film received an honourable mention from the Best Canadian Film award jury. It was subsequently screened at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, where it won the award for Best Dramatic Feature, and at the Vancouver International Film Festival, where it received the Best BC Film Award and the BC Emerging Filmmaker Award.On December 11, the film was named to TIFF's annual year-end Canada's Top Ten list.
At the 8th annual Canadian Screen Awards, the film was nominated for six awards, including Best Motion Picture, and won three, including Best Director.
In January 2020, the film was named the winner of the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Award for Best Canadian Film, and of the Toronto Film Critics Association's $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award.
References
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