Richard Cardinal committed suicide at the age of 17, after spending most of his life in numerous foster homes and shelters throughout Alberta. In this short documentary, Abenaki director Alanis Obomsawin weaves together excerpts from the young man’s diary to create a powerful tribute to his short life. Released in 1984, decades before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the film revealed the systematic neglect and abuse of First Nations children in Canada’s child welfare system. Winner of the Best Documentary Award at the American Indian Film Festival in 1986, the film was shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2008 as part of a retrospective devoted to Alanis Obomsawin and continues to be broadcast worldwide.
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Alanis ObomsawinOne of the most acclaimed Indigenous directors in the world, Alanis Obomsawin came to cinema from performance and storytelling. Hired by the NFB as a consultant in 1967, she has created an extraordinary body of work—50 films and counting—including landmark documentaries like Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). The Abenaki director has received numerous international honours and her work was showcased in a 2008 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “My main interest all my life has been education,” says Obomsawin, “because that’s where you develop yourself, where you learn to hate, or to love.”