Stories Are in Our Bones
2019 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Janine Windolph
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Filmmaker Janine Windolph brings her young sons fishing with their grandmother, a residential school survivor whose deep knowledge of the land turns reconnecting with their homeland into cultural healing and resistance for a family raising children in the city.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a residential school survival story to be about trauma and testimony, and Windolph flips it—she makes it about land, lineage, and what your grandmother's hands know. It's a move so obvious in retrospect that it feels like an act of resistance just by existing.
This sits in a lineage of Indigenous documentary practice that treats the camera as a tool for cultural transmission rather than extraction; the editing rhythm mirrors the patience of teaching, and the frame honors both the grandmother's authority and the children's discovery as equally valid forms of knowledge.
The choice to keep the grandmother's voice dominant—to let her narrate the land rather than the filmmaker—does everything: it refuses the typical documentary hierarchy, trusts the audience to follow her logic, and turns eleven minutes into a masterclass in restraint.