In the Beginning was Water and Sky
2018 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Ryan Ward
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Two First Nations children struggle to find their way back to a home that may be lost forever, in a haunting fairy-tale drama set against water and sky.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a competent fairy-tale frame—kids, mythic landscape, the whole lost-home thing—but it never quite breaks the mold enough to justify itself; the premise does the work, not the film.
Ward locates this Indigenous coming-of-age within a visual and narrative tradition that honors both mythic storytelling and contemporary cinema, with the restraint and formal control to let water and sky do the thematic lifting rather than sentiment.
The decision to strip dialogue and let the landscape—and the children's physicality within it—carry the emotional weight is what makes this work; a smaller choice than it sounds, but it's the one that transforms craft into presence.