Acimow Media

In her search to find the stories of her ancestors' origins, Metis/Cree filmmaker Barbara Todd Hager travels to eight of the oldest Indigenous sites in the Americas to find a connection between origin stories and scientific research.

Tomson Highway: Permanent Astonishment, inspired by his award-winning memoir Permanent Astonishment, follows Highway's extraordinary life, from his birth in a tent in northern Manitoba and years at residential school to his groundbreaking plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, which transformed Canadian theatre.

The documentary explores the extraordinary lives of Kwakwaka’wakw Chief Mungo Martin and Jewish ethno-musicologist Ida Halpern. Their combined efforts nearly 75 years ago led to preventing hundreds of First Nations songs from being lost forever. They not only shared a deep dedication to preserving the embedded cultural knowledge that these songs held, they had also experienced the heart-wrenching effects of cultural genocide on their people.