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Dark Winds and Blood Quantum actor Kiowa Gordon and Sera-Lys McArthur (Café Daughter, Outlander) have joined the cast of Many Wounds, a contemporary re-imagining of Lee Tamahori’s ground-breaking 1994 Maori film Once Were Warriors, set among indigenous communities in Canada.

Skye Pelletier (Prey) stars in Many Wounds as Mashka, a young teenager on the cusp of being swallowed up by a colonial system meant to further the goals of assimilation who becomes a warrior to protect his family.

Ojibway filmmaker Jeremy Torrie, who wrote and is directing Many Wounds, and producing the film together with Métis producer Tanya Brunel, said he drew on his own personal, painful experiences growing up indigenous in Winnipeg for the script.

“Our intention with this film is to reveal some uncomfortable truths about the effects of generations of forced assimilation and genocide by the Canadian government toward our peoples for a society largely unaware of how deep the wounds go,...

For renowned Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) multimedia artist Shelley Niro, the decision to film “Café Daughter” — a coming-of-ager about a Chinese Cree girl in 1960s Saskatchewan — in Northern Ontario was key to its success.

Filmed in the streets, schools and businesses of Greater Sudbury in 2022, “Café Daughter” is based on a 2013 work by Cree playwright Kenneth T. Williams that was inspired by the early life of Lillian Dyck — the first Indigenous woman in Canada to earn a PhD. in science, first Indigenous female senator and first Chinese Canadian senator. Niro, who recently received the first major retrospective of her work at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, tells Variety that the generous grant from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp. helped secure a professional, caring working environment.

“It allowed us to hire local Indigenous people in crew roles and access locations and general services. Having Indigenous people working...