Indian Horse goes celluloid
June 14th, 2016
Film producers Trish Dolman and Christine Haebler of Screen Siren Pictures have commenced casting for a movie version of Richard Wagamese’s novel Indian Horse (D&M 2012) with shooting slated for Sudbury, Ontario, Oka and Kamloops in the fall of 2016. It’s about an Ojibway man named Saul Indian Horse who reviews his life while he’s a reluctant inmate of an alcohol treatment centre. Screen Siren recently made film Hector and the Search for Happiness. Indian Horse was selected as a finalist for the 2013 CBC Canada Reads competition and won the First Nations Communities Reads Awards.
In Indian Horse, according to publicity materials, “a character named Saul Indian Horse has hit bottom. His last binge almost killed him, and now he’s a reluctant resident in a treatment centre for alcoholics, surrounded by people he’s sure will never understand him. But Saul wants peace, and he grudgingly comes to see that he’ll find it only through telling his story. With him, readers embark on a journey back through the life he’s led as a northern Ojibway, with all its joys and sorrows… For Saul, taken forcibly from the land and his family when he’s sent to residential school, salvation comes for a while through his incredible gifts as a hockey player. But in the harsh realities of 1960s Canada, he battles obdurate racism and the spirit-destroying effects of cultural alienation and displacement.”
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