Rustic Oracle: An Indigenous story of truthful fiction - tragedy and despair filtered through a child's eyes

By Thom Ernst

Rating: A-minus

I have contended that the most ethereal aspects of someone's truth—their strengths, their traumas, their charisma—is best portrayed through a story rather than adhering to details and facts. 

It's not an argument I often win, but it's an argument I will take to my grave (and an argument I believe Plato took to his). 

Lake Delisle is a Mohawk girl filtering adult actions surrounding the disappearance of her older sister

I think of how my theory applies to director Sonia Bonspille Boileau's Rustic Oracle. As far as I know, Rustic Oracle is a work of fiction, but a fiction that feeds a larger truth. Rustic Oracle is the story of a young indigenous girl (Lake Delisle) who is witness to her mother's (Carmen Moore) despair after her older sister (McKenzie Deer Robinson) goes missing. 

The police react with notable disregard for the mother's concern, suggesting her daughter is merely acting on the whims of an unruly teen. Even the mother holds on to hope that the girl is rebelling against an imposed curfew. Still, in a world where an overwhelming percentage of Indigenous young girls and women go missing each year, the worst-case scenario is often the most probable. 

Should it matter that the characters in Rustic Oracle don't exist off-screen? Their desperation pitted against the apathy of authorities is too familiar to be categorized as anything but fact.

Boileau narrows the focus of her camera down to Delisle’s character, eight-year-old Ivy, who lives with her mother and older sister on a close-knit Mohawk community. On the disappearance of Ivy’s sister, the community is left to rely on a broken system that treats missing Indigenous women like collateral damage. 

To that effect, Rustic Oracle could have functioned as a compelling public awareness drama, and that would have been fine. But it wouldn't have been much of a movie. Or Boileau could have ruthlessly exploited the harrowing statistics of missing indigenous women and made a plausible shocking thriller, which would be more commercial, but far from fine. 

Instead, whether because of sensible intuition or the unforeseen blessings of low-budget filmmaking, the result is a story told free of the embellishments of synthetic thrills.

Seeing the story unfold through the eyes of Ivy provides the audience with a haunting, albeit quiet, perspective. We know only what Ivy knows. We see only what Ivy sees. We hear only what Ivy hears. 

Our advantage is that age and experience might grant us a more in-depth insight into things Ivy cannot comprehend. We are as helpless as Ivy, who in turn, is at the mercy of adults, powerless in bringing her sister home. 

In one of the film's quietest and yet most devastating moments, we see Ivy taking down handmade posters looking for lost pets, or apartment rentals that have been taped over photos of her missing sister.

Rustic Oracle might be fiction, but there is more accuracy in this story than in any tale about the sinking of the Titanic, a depiction of WWII, or any other fiction born out of well-worn filmic catastrophes. The truth that gives birth to Rustic Oracle is indeed catastrophic, in an immediately relevant way.

Rustic Oracle. Directed by Sonia Bonspille Boileau. Stars Lake Delisle, Carmen Moore and McKenzie Deer Robinson. Plays to Oct. 1 in Toronto at Cineplex Cinemas Yonge-Dundas. Premiering in Kelowna / Nanaimo at Landmark Cinemas. Sept. 25 to Oct. 1. Additional cities to be announced.