“With Ste. Anne, I wanted to make a narrative. I wanted to challenge how we make film, challenge storytelling, and challenge who gets to be part of a film.” (Rhayne Vermette)
Ste. Anne is set and shot in Treaty 1 territory — land taken from First Nations for settler use, following the signing of the treaty in 1871. Today, this territory includes Winnipeg (Canada) and the nearby town that lends the film its title. The debut feature by Manitoban self-taught filmmaker and artist Rhayne Vermette, who previously studied architecture, the film centres on Renée (played by Vermette), who returns to her young daughter after an unexplained absence of several years. Her arrival disrupts the household that her daughter now shares with Renée’s brother and his wife. The tensions caused by her arrival simmer under the surface, as Renée clumsily tries to step back into a maternal role — despite her young daughter having no memory of her.
Commissioned by the Indigenous-led COUSIN Collective and shot over 14 months using both script and improvisation, the film features members of the filmmaker’s family and the Métis community. Continuing the techniques that Vermette developed over years of making abstract and experimental short films, Ste. Anne is as much a fragmentary portrait of the environment and seasons as it is about the people whose lives are shaped in part by nature’s flow.
