TIFF Chat: Once a Teaser Short, Eva Thomas's Nika & Madison Finally Finds Its Feature Length
By Jim Slotek
Since its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, Eva Thomas’s short film Redlights has screened at more than 30 film festivals globally.
That’s not bad for a film that wasn’t even finished.
The 14-minute film was inspired by often fatal incidents of Natives in prairie cities being dumped and stranded by police outside of town in the cold (a grim practice nicknamed Starlight Tours). Kaniehtiio Horn played a woman in pursuit of her best friend Ellyn Jade) as she’s being spirited away in the cold.
The cops stopped, a standoff was imminent, and then the movie ended abruptly.
By extension, my interview back then with Thomas was also unfinished. So now that Redlights has morphed into the TIFF feature Nika & Madison, I tell her it didn’t turn into the film I expected. She’d been inspired by Thelma & Louise, but instead of a 90-minute pursuit, Nika & Madison is largely a police procedural about an assault on an officer by two Indigenous women.
Eva Thomas
“Some of it was budget. We certainly didn’t have Thelma & Louise money,” Thomas says with a laugh. “But at the same time, now I had more time to spend with the women and we could dig into their relationship.”
Also, Thomas’s friend Kaniehtiio Horn “was going to come on to the feature, but then she got pregnant and had a baby and that was another reason I sort of switched up the characters and the names.” Horn continued on as executive producer, but Nika & Madison stars Ellyn Jade as Nika, the friend in pursuit, and Star Slade as city girl Madison who finds herself being abducted by a sex offender officer.
“If my lead character in the short film didn’t get pregnant, we might have stuck with the same characters. But Ellyn (who played the tough Shania on Letterkenny) is really a girl from the Rez. So it’s more natural role for her to play Nika because she really is much like Nika.”
In the interim between short film and feature, Thomas firmed her filmmaking credentials, co-directing the feature Aberdeen with Ryan Cooper, and exec producing Horn’s film Seeds, which was at TIFF last year.
She, in turn, sought the help of another Canadian filmmaker, Michael McGowan (One Week) to shore up the script for Nika & Madison. In the film, reserve elders put up a roadblock against the police, and Thomas decided to tone down that aspect of the film.
“People read the script and said, ‘Oh, I love the girls, but everybody seems to solve their problems for them.’ And the Indigenous community does care for their people and show up for them. And I started to feel like they showed up too much, and took away the women’s agency.
“So, when I was able to work with Michael McGowan, who’s an experienced screenwriter, he helped me shape the structure for the story and also helped me to put the girls in harmful situations, which I had trouble doing on my own.”
Nika & Madison is already scheduled to play at 10 Canadian film festivals, and Thomas says an international debut announcement is imminent.
Next up? “I have a period piece set in a residential school in Edmonton in 1961 where a young girl started a riot and they took over the school for half a day over the quality of their food.
“And we found out it was a true story and that the young woman, Helen Johnson, is still alive and is now an elder. So we connected with her. So that’s a project I’m kicking up the development path.”
And she says she’s wanted to do an Indigenous comedy-action-romance ever since she saw Romancing the Stone. The “stoic Indian” being one of the most erroneous stereotypes, she says, “Everything’s funny to us. We have a thing in our community, if we don’t tease you, it means we don’t like you. There’s always a sense of play.”
I suggest Gary Farmer is great at comedic roles. And the sadly-departed Graham Greene was a natural.
“I had the lovely pleasure of working with Graham on Seeds,” Thomas says. “And he just joked the whole day. At the end of the day, we had some Indigenous trainees on the film and I said they would really love some autographs.
“And he said, ‘Let’s do it!’ He was so emotional, he really cared about everybody.”