Expired December 18, 2023 8:01 AM
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Winner of the Borsos Award for Best Canadian Feature, and the Borsos Awards for Best Director and Best Performance for the ensemble cast, Atikamekw Suns is based on the tragic true story of five young people from the Atikamekw First Nation community of Matawan, Quebec who were found dead in a truck in a river in 1977, and the apathy of the authorities investigating their deaths. 


The film chronicles the police force’s reluctance or inability to pinpoint whether this was a simple accident, or an act of racial hatred. The official response was that it was a “drinking binge gone wrong”, but suspiciously, two white Quebecers survived unscathed. The filmmaker focuses on the five families immediately affected by the tragedy, and the effect that official indifference has on their grieving process. Filmmaker Leriche has referred to the silence surrounding the incident, which has still not been solved forty years later, as “the violence of indifference.” A stunning follow-up to her previous film AVANT LES RUES (BEFORE THE STREETS) which won the Borsos award for Best Canadian feature in 2016, and Best Director, ATIKAMEKW SUNS very much captures the sense of loss that envelopes a community following such a tragedy. In that sense, its tone may remind you of Atom Egoyan’s masterful THE SWEET HEREAFTER. 


Winner of the 2023 Alliance for Women Film Journalists EDA Award for Best Female-Directed Feature.

  • Year
    2023
  • Runtime
    103 minutes
  • Country
    Canada
  • Premiere
    Western Canadian Premiere
  • Director
    Chloé Leriche