Why make a horror movie about the residential school experience? It made sense to Métis filmmaker Malcolm Walsh: “Using the horror genre to tell certain stories that reflect what is going on today or what is going on in the real world with the truth — it opens a doorway.”

Although his new movie The Quiet Darkness uses “a lot of dramatic license” in retelling the story of residential schools, Walsh says the real life atrocities of that dark period of Canadian history go beyond what any horror genre aficionado could make up. And with the film set to be screened at the Dead North Film Festival in Yellowknife next month, he hopes that viewers may find the same power — and feel inspired to come forward. In this video by aRTLeSS Collective filmmakers Jay Bulckaert and Pablo Saravanja, Walsh says that he’s hoping someone will actually go and look out for the Elders.

“Go talk to them, see if they will open up about this, so that we can learn from this and from a lot of other people that were involved in this big awful thing that had happened,” he says.

aRTLeSS Collective is a film production studio and multimedia entertainment company based out of Yellowknife, and founded by Saravanja and Bulckaert in 2013. They are visual storytellers and they tell stories from a proudly Northern point of view.

Dead North Film Festival. Yellowknife. Feb 23-26. www.deadnorth.ca

Watch Exhibitionists Sundays at 4:30pm (5 NT) on CBC.