Maxime Kornachuk’s Where Our Flowers Grow is a wonderful and poignant celebration of heritage and resilience. It’s a moving documentary short about the vital, universal need to reclaim your culture, no matter how distant your generation is, a need long denied to the Métis people.

For generations, many Métis people were pressured to hide their identity and culture. We follow those reclaiming connections to reveal how a culture marked by silence and erasure continues to define itself from one generation to the next.

Documentaries like Where Our Flowers Grow are effective because they understand that cultural identity is not simply about looking into our past. It is about understanding where we come from, recognising the experiences of those before us, and ensuring that culture and those stories are carried forward; those moments are furthered; the communities grow into what they should always have been. This is all the more prevalent when we learn the history of the Métis people, a people who have been denied rights in a wide, horrific variety of ways. As we learn here by one of our subjects, simply because they did not have two types of identification due to an adoption by their mother, they cannot claim to be Métis legally. So they are stuck in a terrible limbo of being part Métis, but not having the rights that they should have.

Kornachuk adds considerable creative flair to Where Our Flowers Grow by focusing on silhouettes and fades as one subject speaks while another listens. It’s utterly gorgeous and fabulously shot by W. James Meagher and edited by John Gurdebeke. What should be a simple talking-head piece is dramatically elevated and symbolic, showing subjects talking within one another and how, together, they struggle for respect and try to escape the attempted erasure. It is astonishingly effective in bringing us into the film. Combine this with the darkness that shrouds our subjects, lit by soft light, like a candle keeping their culture alive in a world that seems to want to snuff it out.

The beadwork that appears throughout the film is a lovely touch, and as the film says, no single bead tells the whole story. The same is true for our subjects: they are just one bead in a mammoth story that needs to be told and shared with the masses. Where Our Flowers Grow is a fantastic start in highlighting the strife these people have gone through, but goodness, they still have a way to go to get the clarity and respect they deserve. The beadwork also celebrates the culture it depicts, which is the cherry on top. Especially when you consider the art itself, it takes patience. Like the Métis people, you have to be resilient to finish a piece.

While Where Our Flowers Grow is directed specifically at the Métis, people from all cultures can relate to it in some way. How do we know stories and traditions passed down to us, and what about the ones we have lost as time moves on? We can resonate with them as they try to reclaim understanding while protecting what cultural identity they have left.

With striking imagery and powerful words, Where Our Flowers Grow celebrates the Métis and highlights the strength of community and resilience in the face of attempts to remove something that should never have been removed, a must-watch.

★★★★

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