How We Stand Brings Mother-Daughters Story to TIFF Premiere
A single mother moves her three daughters from Oklahoma to Los Angeles for a fresh start that ends in tragedy in How We Stand, which holds its world premiere on Sept. 13 at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Los Angeles-set drama is directed by Marie Clements, who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the debut. It is programmed in the festival's Centrepiece programme.
Cara Jade Myers plays Angela, the fictional mother at the centre of the story. Amber Midthunder plays her daughter Jessie, Alyssa Wapanatâhk plays Miranda and Isabel DeRoy-Olson plays Janey, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The family does not hold together.
The move echoes a real policy. In the 1950s, the United States federal government ran its Native American Relocation Program, which led American Indians to leave rural reservations for major cities. Clements first explored that history on stage in Tombs of the Vanishing Indian, a one-woman play commissioned by a Native Voices programme at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.
Clements also wrote the screenplay, expanding the solo stage work into a story about four lives. In the film, Angela and her daughters take shelter with a Native American community in "the tombs," the cemented riverways of Los Angeles. Violence strikes Angela and the sisters are separated. They find each other again in 1970s Los Angeles during a flood.
The wider ensemble includes Darren Mann, Eric Johnson, Gary Farmer, Gil Bellows, Mary Walsh, Evan Adams and Tonantzin Carmelo. TIFF lists How We Stand as a Canadian film by Clements in its Centrepiece programme. The festival presents it as a drama of sisters, performed by rising Indigenous talent and told with touches of magical realism, according to TIFF.
What makes this stand out on the calendar is the scale of the adaptation, from a one-woman stage play to a family story that runs from the 1950s into 1970s Los Angeles.
Clements arrives in Toronto with festival history. She brought the Indigenous drama Bones of Crows to TIFF in 2022, a film that later earned five Canadian Screen Award nominations, according to The Hollywood Reporter. How We Stand was announced among the festival's late additions alongside new titles featuring Zooey Deschanel, Michelle Yeoh and Barry Keoghan, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
