Hot Docs ’26: Ceremony
***/****
directed by Banchi Hanuse
by Angelo Muredda Following the encore screening of Banchi Hanuse’s Ceremony at this year’s Hot Docs, an audience member chimed in to remark that as a Palestinian woman who has seen her share of colonial aggression, she was struck by how similar the tools and logics of different settler states are when it comes to treating contested territory as unoccupied and without history, thus perfect for relocation. Perhaps even more striking than that observation–or the moderator’s decision to thank the audience member for her comment but quickly punt to the next one without letting the filmmaker and her cast of Nuxalk creators and activists respond–is Hanuse’s documentation of the myriad ways in which Indigenous people have responded to those familiar efforts to stamp out their civilizations, from keeping the language alive through their own alternative schools to broadcasting their culture on community radio to documenting their own histories and staging ritual performances of their traditions. Winner of the festival’s DGC Special Jury Prize for Canadian Feature Documentary, Ceremony is an evocative, engaging, and refreshingly talking-head and infographic-free film about how the Nuxalk Nation finds hope for resistance and renewal through these deliberate practices in the face of the broader nation-state’s violent, centuries-long effort to fold them into the Canadian colonial project.
