"Blood Lines", Maurice's latest film, is a meditation on forgiveness.Elevation/Supplied
Gail Maurice was 19 or 20, newly arrived in Vancouver in the 1980s, when she first saw white film trucks lining a street for a location shoot. She asked a production assistant what they were, and was thrilled by the answer. “You’re making a movie?” she said. “Can I be in it?”
Maurice didn’t even know Canadians made films. Growing up in the Métis community of Beauval, Sask. – 400 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon, population 700 – her family didn’t own a TV. She loved her life there, but there was no running water, no hospitals. Her school was an infamous former residential school.
That production assistant laughed at her, but Maurice didn’t care; seeing those trucks turned on a light in her. She quit her government social services job, moved to Toronto, found an agent and started acting in films and television shows, including Bones of Crows, The Rez, Cardinal and Sort Of.
Some of her roles felt stereotypical, so she made her own work – nine shorts, which she produced, directed and appeared in. She landed arts council grants and got into film festivals. In 2022, she released her first feature, Rosie, a celebration of coming out and finding your chosen family, which Maurice herself did at 19; the film was chosen as a TIFF Top Ten. And on June 26, her second feature as writer, director and actor, Blood Lines, hits theatres.
Many writer/directors have that one story they can’t let go of, and Blood Lines is Maurice’s. She’s been writing it in her head since her early 30s, when she spent an evening in Regina at a lesbian bar full of gorgeous Indigenous women, then lay awake alone in her hotel room, imagining what complications might have ensued if she’d picked up a stranger and fallen in love.
A fluent Northern Michif speaker, Maurice is proud that she refused to adopt a more generic Canadian accent early on in her film career. The language is prominent in her latest work.Elevation/Supplied
Her original idea was set in Toronto, and grittier. Over the years, it softened into a meditation on forgiveness. Beatrice (Dana Solomon) has a simple life in her Métis settlement; she speaks Michif, she knows everyone and women elders – the Granny Gang – look out for her. But two events shake her world: Her estranged, alcoholic mother, Leonore (Maurice), now sober, returns hoping to make amends; and an alluring stranger, Chani (Derica Lyn Lafrance), arrives on a mission of her own. Maurice filmed it in a settlement outside North Bay, Ont., and her evocative shots of forests and water make you feel that the land and its people are one soul.
I met Maurice in mid-June in a Toronto office. She wore a black T-shirt and cool aviator glasses with thin tangerine rims. She laughed easily and teared up as well, particularly when discussing her Métis heritage.
“For a lot of my career, people wanted me to lose my accent,” she recalls, “but I made the choice to keep it because it was all I had of home. If I gave in and sounded generic Canadian, I felt it would erase how I was raised, and I didn’t want my village or my grandma” – big swallow – “to think I was ashamed. Because I’m so proud to be this strong Métis woman who has her language.”
That language, Northern Michif, runs through Maurice’s work, and it’s especially prominent in Blood Lines. Because only about 1,000 people speak it, and its pronunciation is nuanced – “full of verbal shoulder pushes, humourous jabs” – Maurice went back to Beauval to audition non-professionals for the Granny Gang, including her own mother, Margaret, who plays Josephine. Two months before cameras rolled, Maurice and the Grannies sent Solomon recordings of the language so she could nail the pronunciation, too. (Especially amusing is the sound “eeeeee,” which the Grannies adapt to any situation – verbal exclamation point, tongue cluck, eye roll.)
“I have a huge matriarchy behind me,” Maurice says. “My great-grandmother was a powerful medicine woman. My mum was a single mum, I never grew up with a father. My grandmother raised me; when I came out, she never batted an eye, she just accepted me. My family has always championed me. I could cross the street safely and they’d be so proud, just for that: ‘Oh my girl, good for you, you got across!’”
When I ask why her grandmother raised her, however, Maurice chokes up again. “I love my mom, I would never change her, but she did struggle with alcohol,” she replies.
One of Blood Lines’ scenes was cathartic for them both: Leonore asks Josephine if she thinks Beatrice will ever be able to forgive her. “It was such a profound moment to share with my mom,” Maurice says. “We stayed in character, but we could see in each other’s eyes the truths of what we were saying.”
A still from "Blood Lines". Maurice won the August Schellenberg Award of Excellence at the imagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival in April, but Maurice believes the mainstream is still largely unfamiliar with her or her work.Elevation/Supplied
Another plot point – white social workers forcing Indigenous mothers to give up their babies for adoption – is also autobiographical: Maurice has a half-brother and a half-sister, both younger, who were removed from her mother. “That theme, told with my sense of humour, will be in my next film as well,” Maurice says. “It’s about three young Indigenous women, and I’m almost finished writing it.” When I ask what it’s called, she answers so dryly, “Eat Dirt,” we both burst out laughing.
“Laughter is my warrior’s cry,” Maurice says. “To laugh in the face of adversity is a kick in the teeth to the people who are trying to annihilate you or keep you down.”
Because it perturbs her that many Canadians know next to nothing about Métis culture, Maurice wrote a lovely speech for Beatrice about what being Métis means to her. “I wanted people to know what it is for me – that when I walk on the land my ancestors walked on, it’s the same, nothing’s changed, I can feel their footsteps, their heartbeats,” Maurice says. “Growing up I never saw an ocean, but the wind through the poplar trees was the ocean to me, the ripples, the whispering sound. My ancestors are everywhere with me when I’m home. I wanted to portray that on film.”
This past April, the woman who once didn’t know what a film truck was won the August Schellenberg Award of Excellence at the imagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival. But however much the Indigenous film community celebrates her, Maurice believes the mainstream has no clue.
“I’ll keep trying,” she says, laughing again. “I’m always working, yet I’m always struggling. But I’m proud to say I never compromised to get here. I’m proud of all the things I’ve made. I love acting. I love carrying my culture inside me. I love telling our stories in every way we can. I love it all.”