The documentary FOR LOVE is now available on Netflix Canada. As we approach Sept. 30’s Day of Truth and Reconciliation – this film is a good step in learning more about the need for this day of awareness and understanding.
Narrated by music legend Shania Twain, a long-time advocate for children’s rights, FOR LOVE exposes the link between residential schools and the 29,000 Indigenous children and youth currently in Canada’s child welfare system.
Producer/writer Mary Teegee of Carrier Sekani Family Services (CSFS) and producer/writer/director Matt Smiley are the creative team behind the poignant and profoundly moving film. Teegee and Smiley previously collaborated on the award-winning documentary HIGHWAY OF TEARS (2015) which dealt with missing and murdered Indigenous women in British Columbia. More information on FOR LOVE can be found here.
“The horrors of residential schools are finally starting to be understood by non-Indigenous Canadians and Americans,” said producer Mary Teegee. “I wanted this movie to create awareness about the generational trauma caused by residential schools. But it also celebrates the resilience of our people, and shows how communities across the country are rebuilding family connections and rich cultures.”
Activists Cindy Blackstock and Warner Adam, CSFS CEO, lend their support as executive producers to FOR LOVE as an ongoing part of the work around Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. Approximately 150,000 children attended residential schools until the last one closed in 1997. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has condemned them as ‘cultural genocide.’
“At this time – more Indigenous families are being separated, with children being removed from communities, by the state-driven child welfare system than were displaced at the height of the residential school system” said Adam. “We are finally finding pathways to work with all levels of government while we rebuild our cultural ways of ensuring our children remain safe so they can thrive.”
Winner of Best Documentary at the Mammoth Film Festival and recently nominated as a finalist for the 2022 Evident Change Media for a Just Society Awards, FOR LOVE is a film of resilience and resurgence.
Travelling across the country, FOR LOVE tells the heartbreaking stories of Indigenous people and reveals the atrocities inflicted by the Canadian child welfare system; however, the film shines a light on how Indigenous communities are taking back jurisdictional control of their children in order to ensure that their unique and diverse cultures are preserved for generations to come.