Film shot around Fond du Lac Reservation to debut in Cloquet
BY Ann Klefstad Duluth News Tribune April 1, 2008

A feature film freighted with the ghostly but real stories of hundreds of people and the hopes of healing even more, "Older than America," will debut on Thursday at the Premier Theater in Cloquet, near where it was filmed on the Fond du Lac Reservation last winter. The film sets several subplots swirling around a dark secret. Rain, the protagonist, is unable to commit to her police officer boyfriend, Johnny (Adam Beach). Rain's Auntie Apple (Tantoo Cardinal) raised her because her mother was committed to a mental institution. Rain fears her mother's madness in herself when she begins to see a figure from her dreams in real life.

At the center of all the plots lies an old Catholic boarding school. Everyone wants something from it or wants to keep something about it hidden: The Catholics want a cover-up, a geologist wants to investigate, a developer wants to build " and something in the school wants to be known.

Georgina Lightning, the film's co-writer, director and lead actress spoke Monday of the sorrow, hopelessness and suicides that she grew up with on a reservation near Edmonton, Alberta. Much of this pain she attributed to the common experience in her parents' generation of forcible attendance at Catholic boarding schools. Such schools were part of the attempt by government and church to suppress Indian culture in the name of assimilation.

Lightning's own father experienced a school like this, so the subject is very close to her. And when she was younger and lived on her reservation in Canada, she worked at the youth center with kids of parents scarred by the same experience. After two of those children, 13 and 14, killed themselves during her time in Los Angeles studying film, she decided that she "couldn't be in just any movie; some fun thing, some silly thing." She didn't want to make "an Indian boarding school movie, because we'd get an audience about this big," she said, making a tiny shape with her fingers. "I wanted to make an entertaining movie that would also tell people this story."

Lightning said it originally was a Plains story, as that is her background. The plan had been to film in South Dakota, but she said the state's Film Commission didn't do a good job of facilitating the shoot. Her co-writer Christine Walker helped draw her to Minnesota.

"Christine lives in Minneapolis, and she said I could get better deals here. When we went to Cloquet, the first person we met was Rikki McManus [from the Minnesota Film Board] at Gordy's Hi Hat."

With McManus's help, they got things rolling. Lightning and Walker explained the story to leaders of the Fond du Lac Band.

"Next day they called and said, 'Can you be here this afternoon?' And when we got there, the chairman said, 'There's not one person on this rez who wasn't affected by the boarding schools, so what do you want?'

" The tribe didn't give money directly, but Lightning said she's very grateful for the material help and cooperation from the people of Fond du Lac, which saved them a lot of expense and made the shoot much easier.

"Locations, extras, trucks, housing. ... We needed to get a deal on hotel rooms at the casino; they called the next day, offering rooms for $25 a night, and no location fees. They had natural resources crews doing tech work, running electricity. " She said the tribe made one condition: They wanted to throw the wrap party for the crew. Lightning describes the festivities as wonderful: a traditional celebration, with drumming by the kids in the Ojibwe School drum group, who also are in the movie. Most of the film was shot at Fond du Lac and also at the old Washington School outside of Cloquet.

Other scenes were shot in Nopeming, the abandoned nursing home near Cloquet. Lightning's memories of that site are less fond:

"It was pretty creepy. We had to have a cleaning crew get the mold out, because it was toxic with mold. It was too big to heat, so we blew propane heaters on the set. You could see your breath " I remember running down the rotten old stairs in bare feet. It was so cold! So I put in a scene where I steal some boots."
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