MorningStar Angeline

(On Cable TV, October 2020) Despite its nearly-all-native cast and focus on First Nation issues, there’s a broadly accessible quality to The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw’s narrative. In many ways, it’s a transposition of the old “college-educated young person goes back to small town” plot template, as the titular Mitzi feels compelled to abandon an upwardly-mobile career in Toronto as a fashion designer to go back to the reserve so that she can take care of her mother. What she rediscovers there is the old accumulation of romantic entanglements, dysfunctional family, old rivalries and the complications of living away from the big city. Where the film proves itself more interesting than expected is in the various flights or fancy (or moments of magical realism—your pick) that enliven the otherwise realistic narrative. Working at the limits of a very low budget, The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw gets us in fantasy, horror and science fiction as it leaps inside its lead characters’ inner life. MorningStar Angeline is remarkable as the protagonist, credibly portraying a young adult going through a rite of passage rediscovering herself. Despite the very serious underpinnings of the themes, there’s an undeniable joy to the character and to the film itself. The conclusion isn’t quite as strong as the rest, but there’s an easy-to-like quality to the result that owes a lot to writer-director Shelley Niro’s ease with the material and competent handling of the camera in richly landscaped surroundings. Canadian First Nation filmmaking is undergoing a significant upswing right now, and The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw is another example to add to the growing corpus of such films worth watching.