How her job as a community counsellor taught this filmmaker to be a better storyteller

CBC

2 days ago

For Jules Arita Koostachin, filmmaking is a way for her to bring together all aspects of who she is: as a writer, a community worker, and an InNiNew IsKwew (Cree woman). That mix of identities, as well as a career shaped by years of listening, teaching, and healing, comes together in her new film, Angela's Shadow.
Born in Moose Factory, Ont., and raised between the Cree-speaking Northern Ontario community of Moosonee and Ottawa, Koostachin grew up surrounded by stories — ones passed down by her Cree grandparents and her mother, a residential school survivor. A member of Attawapiskat First Nation, on the ancestral lands of the MoshKeKo, Koostachin carries those histories forward, not just for her community, but through film, sharing them with the nation and the world. That grounding in lived experience and cultural legacy pulses through every frame of Angela's Shadow.
" Angela's Shadow is a deeply personal film rooted in Cree matriarchal strength, and to have audiences respond so powerfully was both humbling and affirming," Koostachin says. "It told me that people are ready — and hungry — for stories that honour Indigenous experience through our own lens, with all the beauty, grief, and spiritual complexity that comes with it."
Angela's Shadow — which premiered at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival — revolves around a young couple, Angela and Henry, who travel north from Ottawa to visit Angela's nanny, Mary. When Angela becomes haunted by a menacing shadow figure, Mary turns to banned Cree ceremonies to protect her and her unborn child. As Angela unearths long-buried truths about her ancestry and the spirit's identity, she's drawn deeper into her own spiritual traditions, confronting her husband's increasingly rigid, purity-obsessed worldview.
Angela's Shadow is set primarily in the mid-1930s, a time when Indigenous ceremonies were outlawed in Canada and the residential school system was in full force. The story moves between Ottawa and the remote Cree community of KiiWeeTin, along James Bay.
"I chose this setting because it's a pivotal era in our herstory — one where Indigenous families were being torn apart, but women like Angela's nanny Mary found ways to preserve knowledge, medicine, and kinship through quiet resistance," Koostachin says.
Before turning to filmmaking, Koostachin worked as a counsellor in social services and taught at colleges and universities in Toronto, Sudbury, and Vancouver. Those roles, she says, helped lay the foundation for her storytelling.
Koostachin's work in the social service sector and educational system has deeply shaped the way she approaches filmmaking, particularly with a story like Angela's Shadow.
"I've sat with people in their most vulnerable moments, and that's taught me to listen with care, to honour silence, and to understand trauma not just as an individual experience, but as something carried through generations, she says."
While teaching, Koostachin witnessed how storytelling could bridge worlds: urban and rural, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. These experiences not only expanded her understanding of how stories move across spaces but also deepened her connection to her own community's histories, languages, and ways of knowing.
Koostachin's path into filmmaking was shaped early through her studies in documentary media. In 2010, she completed a master's degree at Toronto Metropolitan University (then called Ryerson University), earning both the Award of Distinction for her thesis and the prestigious Ryerson Gold Medal for highest academic achievement. That academic grounding helped launch a career rooted in storytelling as a form of cultural reclamation.
She has since learned to translate lived experience into powerful visual narratives. While in graduate school, she directed her first feature documentary, Remembering Inninimowin — a personal journey of reconnecting with the Cree language. She was later selected as one of six participants for the Creative Women Workshops Association's prestigious Women in the Director's Chair program, where she directed a scene from her award-winning feature script Broken Angel.
"Film is visceral," she says. "It lets me layer visuals, sound, silence, and spirit in ways that echo our orality while reaching wide audiences. I'm drawn to its power to hold space for our truths. It's where I can reclaim narrative sovereignty and offer stories that reflect the complexity and beauty of our lived experience."
Koostachin deepened her filmmaking practice through doctoral research that centred Indigenous storytelling on its own terms. She earned a PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia, where her dissertation, MooNaHaTihKaaSiWew: Unearthing Spirit, explored how Indigenous knowledge systems can live within cinematic form — ideas that shape both the structure and spirit of Angela's Shadow.
"With Angela's Shadow, I brought all of that — the therapeutic, the academic, the cinematic — into a story that is grounded in an InNiNeWak (Cree) worldview, but universally resonant. She says. "Every frame is informed by lived experience, cultural protocol, and a deep respect for our matriarchs. It's where I can reclaim narrative sovereignty and offer stories that reflect the complexity and beauty of our lived experience," she describes.
Koostachin's work has garnered numerous awards over the years, with her most recent honour — the Panorama Audience Award at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival for Angela's Shadow — marking a particularly meaningful milestone. For her, the recognition extends far beyond individual acclaim; it's a celebration of the cast, crew, and Cree community who shaped the film, and a tribute to the matriarchs, languages, and generations carried forward through its story.
Koostachin invites audiences to watch Angela's Shadow as a vital act of truth-telling, healing, and cultural reclamation.
"As a cultural contribution, it challenges dominant narratives and brings forward a Cree worldview that is rarely seen on screen — one that is matriarchal, spiritual, and profoundly relational. It's not just a film; it's a continuation of storywork — a cinematic offering to those still seeking their way home."