Night Raiders (2021) | Danis Goulet

Okay, good evening. Welcome to the Wilder for this installation of our science fiction against the margin series. Um, just out of curiosity, how many of you all have been to one of them already? One of the SFAMs. Awesome. Okay, great. So, you know, you know, uh, a little bit about what we're going to do tonight. Um, let me just thank some people and then I'll introduce the films. Um, I I should also introduce myself. My name is Beandrea July. I'm a film programmer here at the archive and um, this series is part of PST Art Art and Science Collide present presented by the Getty and we're so happy to be part of this program and thank the Getty for its generous support. We also want to thank our community partner tonight, UCLA Alumni Association and all of the all of the screenings at the archive are free thanks to the support of uh an anonymous donor. So we want to give them thanks as well. Uh when the curators for the series envisioned science fiction against the margins, they started during COVID culling together ideas and creative inspiration largely in isolation connecting through technology. Film programming, film making, and archiving are all incredibly collaborative efforts. So, it's no wonder that after considering over 300 works that pushed against the boundaries of science fiction, the moving images selected often reflected stories that reimagine the hero. And tonight's film definitely are are part of that. Um, I also want to just let you know about a couple things that are coming up. So, we have just two science fiction against the margins programs left. Um, one is on Friday, December 6th. It's called Earthly Visions and it's a series of films grappling with the natural world. And Saturday, December 14th is closing night and it's with the Londonbased Palestinian filmmaker Lissa Sansour. Um and also if you feel like filling your whole weekend with archival programming, um tomorrow and Sunday my colleague Paul Malcolm is presenting a weekend with the celebrated filmmaker David Lebrun who's a UCLA alum and he will be in person for Q&A both days. So those are just a couple things to put on your radar. Um, also want to thank the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, um, who have been big collaborators on this series, supporting this public program, and they'll be contributing to the forthcoming anthology of original scholarship accompanying Science Fiction Against the Margins. I want to thank the archive staff um, for all they do, as well as the fantastic curators for the series um, who I think at least one of them is here tonight. Um, Noel Nicole Usedu and um also Professor Sha Noriega as well as Maya Montenezler. And finally, I'd also like to thank the uh projection team and the house staff here tonight that make all these screenings possible. All right, so let's get to the matter of the films. Um we have two great films for you tonight, a short film and a feature. The first is um Pumzi, a film out of Kenya um from the filmmaker uh Wanuri Caillou Ka. I'm saying that wrong. Sorry to that name. Um I uh this is a really interesting film. I um I tend to be brief in my introductions, but I think what really binds um the themes of this short with the feature together also from tonight is you have two really um strong female protagonists um who are fighting for what they believe in. Um so uh Pumsi is that version out of Kenya and then we have Nightriders which is um an amazing film. Um, and we have the uh screenwriter and filmmaker here with us tonight, um, Dennis Goule, and she will be here for a Q&A afterward with uh, Professor Kathleen McHugh of the theater um, and television school. And, um, we're really excited about that, so stick around if you can. Um, yes, and the run time for the short is 21 minutes. I always like to say this for those who, like me, always have to go to the bathroom. Um, and the uh feature is 101 minutes, so you could probably sneak out there if you need to. Um, so without further ado, thank you all for being here and enjoy the films and we'll see you back here for the Q&A afterwards. So, we're going to have a Q&A and I'm just going to read our um introductions of our um presenter and our filmmaker. So Danis Koul's films have screened at festivals around the world including Sundance, the Berlin International Film Festival, MoMA, and the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2021, her award-winning feature Night Raiders premiered at Berlin and TIFF, where Danis received a TIFF tribute award for a TIFF tribute award for television. Danis has recently directed the acclaimed FX series Reservation Dogs, which I know you all have heard of. and she is Cree Matise, originally from northern Saskatchewan in Canada. Let's give it up for her. And I will also bring to the stage uh Kathleen McHugh who will be conducting the Q&A. She is a UCLA professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies. She's published two monographs, Jane Campion and the American domesticity from how from a how-to manual to Hollywood melodrama. She's also published articles on US and South Korean film melodrama as well as transnational media, film feminisms and film and TV genres. Her current project considers women's anger as a creative force in contemporary media genres. The science fiction against the margins project gave her the opportunity to write on a favorite sci-fi novel, Octavia Octavia Butler's Kindred, and to research why Butler's groundbreaking vision took 43 years to be adapted to the screen despite its deeply cinematic qualities. So, uh, round of applause for, uh, Danice and Kathleen. Thank you, >> Dad. Wow. Hi everyone. Um, so Danis, I this I just saw your film for the second time and and it's so powerful in terms of place and and environment and I was wondering if you could start us off by talking about what you were thinking about when you wrote the when you wrote the film and the sense of the world you're bringing us into. >> Yeah, thank you. Um, thanks for coming everyone. Um, I started writing it, I think, in about 2014. And about that time, I think all of my work deals with the impact of colonization on indigenous people and how that's been felt in our families. And um, one of the biggest things uh, in Canada was the residential school system, which was a system that took indigenous children away from their families for seven generations of indigenous families in Canada. and it was enforced by law. And I wanted to talk about the impact of that system, but I wanted to do it in a way that sort of thought about the cycles of what happens um going into the future. And I was also thinking about the time about demographics and how it's changing in the US and how I just sort of thought there's definitely going to be a white supremacist backlash coming. and I was writing it in the Obama years. So, I just felt like I wanted to bring all of these things into one space. >> So, it does take place in the United States. >> Uh, no, it actually takes place in a post civil war North America where the map of North America has been redrawn and Canada is now under occupation and the occupying power is the US. But none of these things are named. Um but yeah, it takes place kind of in probably like I imagined it to be kind of like near Winnipeg. >> I don't know why. >> Right. Right. Um so I read somewhere that that with this film you started working in genre and that that was really um an experience that opened things up for you and wh why sci-fi and what what were you able to do or think about? I feel like I made one genre film before this and I think before that I just made kind of straight up dramas but there was something about genre which I fell into accidentally when I was invited to do this short film commission and I did a similar kind of like near future dystopian film and um it just opened up all of this freedom and possibility to talk about the things that we need to talk about and to do it really loudly Like there's something about being freed up from just like total reality to just say like I can actually say whatever I want in this space and it's really amazing and um I was thinking a lot about what indigenous people have had to bear um you know on the back of the founding of Canada and the US and um you know the beginning of the film where there's a voice over from the elder that was actually added very late in the film. It wasn't originally written into the script and it starts with you know we knew that they would come for us again because they had before and we tried to warn the others that they would come too and the others is everyone else because indigenous people have already experienced a total takeover of our land and um and the dislocation of our people and the violent takeover of this land and the them that I'm talking about are the people that just took power here in the US. >> And so these things are cyclical. And I wrote this fake timeline into the future like I just imagining what would happen because the film is set in 2042. And uh in 2024 in the fake timeline that I had written, I looked back on my notes a little while ago and I saw that I had written that there would be an attempted assassination of the president and also that there would be a mass deportation program. And it's not to say that oh my god like I predicted it. It's more that this is predictable. you know, the way that this works is predictable and it goes in cycles and um you know, like this is a really important moment right now. It's a really really important now that we're all sober and we know what we're staring down. You know, it is like time to, as the elder says, the only thing we can do is do this together. Um, so I was wondering if you could talk about the different power of Nisca and Wani Wanses. Yeah. >> Um, because they it seems as if the story has two protagonists. We think it's Niska and then her daughter emerges with this extraordinary power. So, can you talk about um about that and what you were thinking about in >> Yeah, I I think I was thinking about um intergenerational dynamics um because in our communities we talk about intergenerational trauma. So, you know, maybe if you did yourself did not go to residential school but your parent did or your grandparent did, you're still going to be living with the legacy of that. But I also think that there's something that changes from each generation to the next and that the children often in younger generations don't have quite the same baggage. And I think Nisa is a person who lives in fight orflight mode. She's in survival mode. And I think the film's asking what does it mean not just to survive but to thrive. And wasn't the same damage. She didn't live through and this is a post civil war North America as well. So that's the context and Nisa the mother has lived through that and the and was hasn't you know they've fled to the land and uh you know they've lived there alone um and so really it's about um you know that was has an openness to life and she um doesn't necessarily have a magical power. She just communicates and like in my home community, my dad's home community is a place called come and stogo and everyone in back home can call to animals like they all like do moose calls and all kinds of duck calls and and um I was thinking about that skill set as being one of you know my dad grew up on the land hunting and trapping and the skill set's amazing and has that skill set and also because she doesn't have the baggage of thinking that drones are a threat, she also just has an openness to them. And um I often go to the language when I'm looking for clues about how to approach things. And you know, there's this trope in sci-fi that you know, as soon as the AI or like the bots become sentient, they're going to come and kill us. And I was thinking about that trope and then I went to the language to find out like what what would we think of that and cre has um this kind of it's not a binary but there is a system of animate and inanimate and in our language the rocks are regarded as living and so I thought well if the rocks are regarded as living then maybe the machines would also be regarded as living because they're made of rocks and minerals and then what would that world view mean and to Wasis as a character, it means that she um regards that with respect and with care. And then the machines um you know respond to her in kind because they've only ever been treated as subservient tools of the occupying force. And then that's why they begin to behave like organic, you know, birds. Um, and in that it's almost like they evolve in that moment of her kind of regard and communication to them. >> Um, following on that comment about language, I wonder if you could talk about the sound design and and all the different things that went into that because I was really noticing it watching watching the film this time. Yeah, we worked with these two this amazing sound design um couple in New Zealand because the film was a co-production with New Zealand and um you know there's a Mari character in there played by Alex Terrant and I I was thinking a lot about kind of um global indigenous solidarity. Um, and one of the things I did to research the film was to go to Standing Rock when that was happening. And um, this Whoa. Speaking of sound, [Music] >> are we having a fire drill? [Music] >> Oh my goodness. >> If we don't get to keep talking, thank you everybody so much. Thank you. Oh my gosh. >> Well, we're back. And we were talking about sound design. Um, right. And look what happened. But >> sound design all happened down in New Zealand uh in the pandemic. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> So, I'm >> It was beautiful. >> I'm gonna ask one more question and then we'll take questions from the audience. So my last question is about your the things that influenced you or you were thinking about were there films or we were talking about um afroofuturism just if you could just talk a little bit about the the things that were were inspiring you when you >> Yeah. Um I you know I think there has been a movement um under the umbrella term of indigenous futurism that I think kind of came in a wave after afroofuturism and um the two are sort of in conversation when with one another and I wasn't necessarily thinking of that. I was just sort of in my own little realm writing the film, but um I started to kind of tap into what these movements kind of talk about as I was writing it. And for myself, you know, um I don't know, I just think about it very simply. Like I don't know that much about sort of futurism as a theory. More so that, you know, um we as indigenous people were not meant to exist in the future. We don't um we never show up in futuristic spaces or in sci-fi spaces. And for us to declare that we have a future is a subversive act. and then to place us into the actual future even if it's imagined and even if the future isn't any better um maybe even be worse in a post civil war North America um that we are still here >> you know and that saying that you know it's almost like a declaration of we have always been here we are still here and we will always be here so in the midst of these times and in the times of a genocide side, you know, to say that we in a larger sense in the way we express solidarity with others that are, you know, at the hands of occupying forces um the way we express our solidarity with Palestine is so critical um because again we need to do it together like we none of us can stand alone in this. >> Okay. Thank you. [Applause] So, uh, questions. Are there questions for Danis? >> There we go. Yes. >> I I was curious about perspective. >> Yeah. So the question was was the young girl do I imagine that she you know became jaded I guess and sort of like um would eventually I guess have a a negative attitude like be damaged in the same way and I don't think you know when each generation changes to the next I really do think something different happens like even if they still have to go up against you know an occupying force. I think that the baggage is just different. And um I'd actually written an imaginary scene that never ended up. It was just like something that ended up in the parking lot and it was you know she was a resistance fighter in her early 20s and she was commanding a fleet of drones. So it's like, you know, you can imagine, you know, what she like a kind of power that she has stepped into at the very end of the movie and where that might go, you know. >> Yes, Alex. >> Thank you. I'll ask a question about the title because I was reading it both ways like the Night Raiders are the occupying force but the Oh, that the Night Raiders are the occupying force but the Night Raiders are also the indigenous resistance and >> Oh, that's really cool. >> And yeah, and what does the night symbolize? like there's a power in the night in the darkness and the ability to you know kind of move undetected unless of course one is detected by drones or lights or whatever. So I was just wondering like the the title the title is you know gives it that sci-fi feel but I'm just curious you know how you would unpack it. Yeah, I think I thought of the night raiders as the indigenous raiders that break into themmies at night and steal their children back. And I guess I was kind of um playing with the trope in, you know, like I think we've heard stories of um different nations that would raid other camps. And there's the depiction of this in some Hollywood movies, but in Hollywood, um, you know, especially in the John Wayne era of, you know, indigenous representation, it was really damaging. I mean, we were always just there to be killed. We were savages. We were bloodthirsty. And so, it's like the idea of a sneaky raider going into a camp at night, which kind of stokes like white settler fear. Um, I almost wanted to like just turn that around and be like, "What if you could raid for good and that those skills are amazing and to be subversive in a world that's under total surveillance is actually a really it's like you go in the cloak of darkness so that you're not seen." Um, so that's kind of I think where I the title was there for a long time. I almost can't remember where it came from anymore. Other questions? >> Was it also intentional on your part to make uh the leaders tend to all be female? >> Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for that question. Um yeah, I wanted to uh really express just my own reverence for matriarchal leadership. Um especially in different indigenous communities and women in many communities have played essential roles in resistance and um I just wanted to like acknowledge and honor that. Um, and also in my own family, um, my grandmother passed away when my dad was 16. So, I sort of think that there's something where I'm always missing that kind of, um, matriarchal figure, even though I had lots of aunties and other relatives. It's like I sort of like really think just personally there's something there. Couple more questions. >> Sure. One's about how you found the actors and the other one is about the humor. There's it's the little bits of humor, you know, strippled in all of the action. >> Yeah. I think humor is about survival, but it's also just like joy and vibrancy. And in the midst of the worst situations, I think humor is vital to kind of our humanity. And also, it's culturally specific. Like if I go home to a funeral, you will hear like louder than loud laughter of everybody just like having, you know, there's just a lot of joy even in hard situations. And I think that that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. And so I wanted to find little places to put that into the film. Um, and I can't remember what your other question. Oh yeah. Um, so I knew El Maya, the lead, Nisa. She, um, is a filmmaker in her own right. And, um, yeah, she was incredible in the audition. when we did call backs, um I think I cried in the like in the later audition she did. She was so vulnerable and yet had this toughness about her. Um, and then Gail Maurice, the CRE speaking leader of the camp, is a friend and also an amazing filmmaker. And I'd known her for years and knew that she was an incredible actor, but also just a fluent CRE speaker. And it's a lot easier when you have that built in as opposed to have to teach someone how to speak. Um and then Brooklyn who plays Wasis was um we looked all over North America at hundreds of young people. We had casting folks in Canada and the US and um we found her um in Canada actually um when we were in prep so kind of late into the process and she came in to read for the Victoria role which is the person who's her enemy within the within the school. Um and as soon as I saw her I was like oh my god get her in here we got to read her fories. And there was a question in the back. >> Um, I have more of a comment than a question. I I just really liked the exploration of the artificial intelligence machines. um that I think most modern sci-fi kind of misses on is the the notion of what life is worthy of our respect and that can be branched out to beyond AI, you know, to what life is worthy of respect for an audience um for a life that they're not familiar with. I think I just really love that aspect of it. >> Thank you so much. me asking uh how did Amanda Plameumber get involved uh with this script? >> Oh yeah. I mean I I thought yay. >> The US casting director thought she like had the idea and then we just called her and said if she would do it and she did. >> Yeah. It was super cool. >> Okay. So, I have a last question, which is um I'm wondering if you could talk about what you're working on now. >> Yeah, sure. I um have a TV pilot in development that's based on a podcast called Stolen, which um won a Pulitzer Prize, and it's the second season of it, and I highly recommend checking it out. It's by a CRE journalist named Connie Walker and it is about her own family's experience in residential schools and it is totally riveting and really moving and beautiful. And then I'm also writing another feature um that is about um a woman in a village in an unnamed place in time who begins to get visitations from a monster slashbeing that is telling her to rebel against the small village that she lives in. And it's kind of about rage. >> We bonded at dinner over this. >> Yes. because you're writing about women's rage. I appreciate that a lot. >> Well, okay. Well, thank you all for coming and Danis, thank you for the brilliant film. [Applause]