Film Review – Shana: The Wolf’s Music

The film opens with compelling footage, largely black and white, in first person perspective. We  move swiftly, low to the ground, through sagebrush. Suddenly, the perspective alters and we observe a white wolf loping through tangled wilderness and scrubby, twisted trees. It’s then we realize we’d been seeing through wolf eyes. This shift occurs repeatedly, from first to third point of view, as the wolf tears through high grassland, bent on reaching a lone tree in the middle of a field. As she gets closer, strains of haunting music emanate from its luscious leaves.

Beneath the branches, slight movement, a hint of color, and we can almost make out a figure, obscured by shadow. Emerging now, it proves to be a slight, dark-haired girl, braids cascading to the waist. She scans the grasses seeming to know something or someone is out there. But the wolf is hunkered down hidden in tall grass, watching. A breeze finds its path. The sound of wood chimes, the fluttering of ephemera hung in the branches, hardly visible, set as they  are against stillness, brings a moment of suspense.

Then the girl returns to her place under the tree. Facing its trunk, she takes up her violin and resumes the lament previously interrupted.

Soon we learn a strand of hair, handwritten petitions rolled into scrolls tied with ribbon, and other treasured things extend from the tree’s branches.

The entire tree is an altar and the violin music is a sacrament.

To give any more detail would intervene in the viewer’s experience. Just know it’s a multi-layered, touching film about loss, intergenerational trauma, hope, friendship—how one young First Nations girl finds her way through with the help of guides.

This German movie was filmed in British Colombia on Scw’exmx Nation land with members of the People of the Creek playing the characters, all first-time actors. Director Nino Jacusso is Swiss, and the film was drawn from the novel by Italian writer Federica de Cesco.

There is an English version available for viewing on Amazon Prime Video.