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New year’s Rezolution for 2022

Montreal’s Rezolution Pictures is finding a global market for its Indigenous drama and the company will be at Content London to showcase some of its recent successes in the scripted sector.

 

Rezolution Pictures, a Canadian production company specialising in Indigenous content, has amassed a mountain of awards for documentary projects during its 20-year career, including Peabody-winning Reel Injun in 2009 and numerous other accolades for 2017’s Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World.

 

Success in the scripted marketplace, however, has proven much harder to come by. Until the last two years, that is.

 

In June, Canadian broadcaster Bell Media announced it had ordered Little Bird, produced by Rezolution and Original Pictures, for its Crave SVoD service. The six-part limited series, about an Indigenous woman on a journey to find her birth family and uncover the hidden truth about her past, was co-commissioned by Crave alongside Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN).

 

Fon
Christina Fon, Rezolution Pictures

The show is the first scripted drama series for Montreal-based Rezolution, which was co-founded by Cree producer Ernest Webb and Catherine Bainbridge in 2001.

 

Another interesting facet of the project is that while Crave has garnered acclaim and viewers for comedies including Letterkenny, Little Bird is the first original drama commissioned by the streaming service.

 

High-profile producer attachments likely made the project even more attractive to Crave’s commissioning team. Creators Jennifer Podemski and Hannah Moscovitch serve as executive producers alongside Jeremy Podeswa, the Emmy-winning Canadian director best known for his work on HBO’s Game of Thrones.

 

Bainbridge
Catherine Bainbridge,
Rezolution Pictures

Christina Fon, VP and executive producer at Rezolution, says the project comes at a time when there’s a “huge appetite for Indigenous content internationally.”

 

The greenlight also comes as Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous peoples is making headlines worldwide, following the shocking discovery of mass unmarked grave sites across the country. The graves have been at residential schools, which were government-funded boarding schools run by religious authorities during the 19th and 20th centuries with the goal of assimilating Indigenous youth. The discoveries have shone a light on the historic abuses suffered by Indigenous communities in Canada.

 

It is crucial that stories like the one told in Little Bird are seen internationally, says Bainbridge, as they flip the script on the popular narrative of Canada as a country without conflicts. “We’re considered as nice, globally, and people don’t realise that Canada has these dark chapters.”

 

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World

To ensure Little Bird resonates with as large an international audience as possible, Bainbridge says the storytelling has been crafted with themes that will appeal universally.

 

“It’s not just a story about trauma but a transformative story of the power of love, family and hope. I think those elements are what are bringing international partnerships on board and giving our partners confidence that this will sell around the world,” she said, adding that the announcement of an international distribution partner for the series is imminent.

 

The Little Bird greenlight is part of a concerted push into the marketplace for scripted drama, with Fon teasing that significant announcements are forthcoming that will change how the industry views Rezolution’s place in the scripted space.

 

Mohawk Girls
Mohawk Girls

Another breakthrough for Rezolution came earlier this year when NBCUniversal-owned US streamer Peacock acquired its Indigenous comedy series Mohawk Girls. The half-hour project ran for five seasons on OMNI and APTN in Canada between 2014 and 2019, garnering acclaim and a loyal fanbase. But a sale into the US proved elusive.

 

“We were trying and trying but we couldn’t push that door down,” says Fon of the initial attempts to sell Mohawk Girls in the US. “Then Peacock launched its streaming service and we eventually got the deal finalised. Once Mohawk Girls launched in the US, it changed everything.”

 

The show sits alongside Peacock original Rutherford Falls, another Indigenous-led sitcom, and Fon says the signs are good that more Indigenous stories will be told – and given the platform to reach large audiences – in the future.

 

Gespe'gewa'gi: The Last Land
Gespe’gewa’gi: The Last Land

The exposure of Mohawk Girls to US audiences has been a boon for Rezolution, as well as the stars of the series. “Most people had not seen Mohawk women before,” says Fon.

 

With the wind seemingly at its back, Rezolution plans to dig much deeper into the scripted market, revealing new and untold stories to a global marketplace that is increasingly receptive to Indigenous storytelling. The company is heading to Content London this month as part of the Quebec delegation organised by SODEC.

 

“We’re not Johnny-come-lately to this. We’ve been telling stories for a long time, but now we’re taking that to an international level,” says Bainbridge.

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