Ceremony

Ceremony, a powerful feature documentary directed by Nuxalk Nation filmmaker Banchi Hanuse, begins with a localized environmental mystery: the sudden disappearance of the ooligan (a culturally vital, smelt-like fish) from the Bella Coola River in British Columbia. Rather than framing this loss as a simple ecological crisis, the film follows Nuxalk biologists and community members as they investigate the absence outward. Using the ramshackle local station, Nuxalk Radio, as a "courtroom, confessional, and conjuring ground," the film peels back layers of history through archival recordings and rare testimonies. The investigation untangles a dark, centuries-old colonial web, mapping the vanishing of the fish directly to an illegal land claim filed on the exact day that smallpox was intentionally introduced to the village—a genocidal devastation that left less than one percent of the Nuxalk population alive.

See full details →