As rare as shared director’s chairs are in this business, as difficult as they are to pull off, the journey of directing this film could never have been completed solo. The collaboration was essential – not in spite of our differences, but because of them.

A generation apart, we were strangers just three years ago. Now we are literally tied at the hip. One a First Nations woman with a career grounded in exposing injustice against Indigenous peoples. The other a privileged white guy coming to terms with his country’s violent colonial legacy.

The mission itself was daunting and unprecedented: to ‘flip the lens’. To tell a story that has never been told before. To have subjects go on camera and talk about their own complicity in a current-day genocide. Our unlikely pairing is what convinced people to feel trusted and listened to.

We navigated trauma, resistance, and our own blind spots. We also learned how to apologize to one another while still keeping the project moving forward.

And in spite of everything, and maybe because of it, , the magic happened. We discovered that what we had in common was much stronger than what separated us. We recognized parallels between the genocide against Indigenous peoples and the Holocaust, and the long shadow both cast on our lives and communities. And we recognized that others would see this too.

The magic happened in so many ways: tag-teaming on interviews, often exchanging roles of good cop/bad cop; constantly questioning our own perspectives; catching ourselves if our lens shifted away from the perpetrators and back to the traditional narrative script of focusing on victims and survivors; a four-handed dig through 60+ hours of interviews, searching for the thread that bound the best clips together.

We approached the film with deep interviews—soul-searching, and reflective. We searched for deeper themes that could help dismantle the lingering colonial structures of an apartheid in this country. We framed these systems and structures as ‘spaces’ not as fixed or immutable, but places of entrenched policy. Through this lens, we aimed to question what is occurring in policy and place—because this place, this land called Canada, is all left to us and future generations. We tried to crack open and expose this country to the subtleties of its past and its present. By doing this, we believe we can confront the larger human rights atrocities mirrored across the world.

Most of all, we worked to build on what our different cultures had bequeathed to both of us – the gift of storytelling and an immense gratitude for the privilege and responsibility in being able to walk hand-in-hand to tell this one.