Award-winning Indigenous film casts Tom Longboat as wisecracking running coach

It’s tempting to refer to Run Woman Run, the new film by Heiltsuk and Mohawk writer/director Zoe Hopkins, as the Indigenous Brittany Runs A Marathon. The two films have a lot in common, in that both deal with a young woman who embraces the marathon as a means of coming to grips with her health and her life choices. But Run Woman Run manages to be about so much more: intergenerational trauma, Indigenous health, suicide and the preservation of Indigenous languages and culture–and yet it still manages to be lighthearted, funny and highly entertaining. You could say that, like its heroine, it’s a glass-half-full kind of movie (there being no word for ’empty’ in Mohawk).

The plot concerns a single mom, Beck (played by Dakota Ray Hebert), who is raising her son, Eric, while living in her widowed father’s house and working at his automotive business (Lorne Cardinal from Corner Gas). Beck loves pizza, donuts and cigarettes, and would rather drive than walk the 75 metres from her house to her mailbox. She doesn’t see any of this as a problem, even after going into a diabetic coma and waking up in the hospital. Her denial is stronger than the entreaties by her dad, sister and son that she take better care of herself. But she is repeatedly visited by the spirit of 1907 Boston Marathon winner Tom Longboat (to whom she is distantly related, Longboat having grown up in the Brantford, Ont. area, where the film is set), who mostly teases her about how out of shape she is. Then Eric decides to go and live with his dad, and Longboat finally persuades Beck to turn things around, for the sake of her son. And not only does she embrace running, but she decides to take on the marathon–in a month.

Of course, in real life, most people who take on the marathon on so little training end up injured or completely turned off running (or both). But we willingly suspend disbelief and accept the possibility that Beck has really changed, because the film is charmingly sweet and never takes itself too seriously. Beck even embraces her Mohawk heritage, signing up for language lessons–though it doesn’t hurt that a handsome young acquaintance is also studying.

Verisimilitude aside, there are worse ways to spend a Wednesday evening.

The film has received numerous awrds, including the Audience Choice Award at the 2017 imagineNATIVE Film Festival, the Best Canadian First Feature Film award at the 2018 Victoria International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the 2021 Maui Film Festival.

Click here for a list of screenings across Canada this week.