nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up (52 minutes)
2019 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Tasha Hubbard
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, dark, tender
Following the 2016 death of Colten Boushie and the acquittal of the man who shot him, this documentary follows his family's pursuit of justice and examines racism in Canada's legal system, alongside the filmmaker's personal history and a vision for Indigenous children's safety.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This could've been a straightforward rage-doc, but Hubbard refuses the easy lane—interweaving family testimony with her own archive, she dismantles the myth that Canadian justice is colorblind without ever needing to preach, which somehow makes it more corrosive.
A formally sophisticated intervention in the documentary essay tradition, where personal archive and collective memory become methodology; the 52-minute architecture allows for the kind of compositional breathing room that transforms a case study into an interrogation of institutional structures.
The masterstroke is the decision to center Colten's siblings' voices alongside Tasha's own reflection—a choice that reframes the entire film from legal proceeding into something about intergenerational bearing of witness, and it's that shift in register that makes the film undeniable.