Slts’lani Banchi Hanuse’s CEREMONY Is One of SXSW’s Standout Documentaries

Documentary filmmaker Slts’lani Banchi Hanuse’s CEREMONY had its world premiere in the SXSW’s Documentary Spotlight program, with screenings held March 14 and March 16, 2026, at the Alamo Lamar. Hanuse and members of the film team were in attendance as the documentary made its debut, and the project also earned a nomination for SXSW’s newly introduced Green Lens Award, presented by the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance to a film or television work that speaks to climate change, a changing world, or more sustainable futures.

In CEREMONY, the disappearance of ooligan from Bella Coola opens onto a deeper history, one shaped by loss, displacement, and the forces that have worked to sever Nuxalk people from their lands and waters. Framed through broadcasts from a remote radio station, the film follows Nuxalk voices as they move through testimony, watercolour animation, and rare archival footage to recover truths long ignored.

That radio structure became one of the film’s defining choices. Hanuse said Nuxalk Radio gave the documentary a way to speak from within the community rather than from an outside perspective. “The station was founded the same year we started filming, and one of its first major broadcasts was the lead-up to the sputc ceremony, which was also our first shoot day in 2014,” she said. “Even though radio wasn’t the spine from the start, it became the right structure in the edit because the story is fundamentally about Nuxalk law and responsibility, and ‘Broadcasting the laws of the lands and waters’ is the station’s purpose/slogan.”

She said the broadcasts also altered the film’s tone. “People speak differently when they’re talking to their own people and not directly to a lens,” Hanuse said. “Nuxalk Radio gave us intimacy, comfort, humour, and grief more honestly because Nuxalkmc are addressing Nuxalkmc.”

Work on the film began in 2014 after Hanuse was asked by Nuxalk leadership to take it on. Over the years, she said, the project became inseparable from a deeper sense of obligation. “The film began as a request by my Nuxalk community leadership,” she said. “There weren’t parameters on what it should include, but once I started, it became a responsibility I couldn’t shake.”

That responsibility extended beyond the present moment. Hanuse said she felt accountable to both Nuxalkmc and the ancestors, especially as local history was being retold in ways that made colonial violence easier to overlook. “I didn’t want our story softened into something comfortable for settlers or lost for our youth,” she said.

The film’s animated sequences help carry that larger vision. Hanuse said they bring viewers into the Nuxalk ancestral worldview and make clear that the story moves across more than one realm. “You’re not just watching events unfold,” she said. “You’re being asked to watch with more patience and to understand that what’s at stake isn’t only ecological, it’s spiritual.”

That same grounding shapes how CEREMONY approaches science and ceremony. Hanuse said the film does not treat them as opposing forces. “In the film, science and ceremony aren’t competing; they’re two responsibilities that exist at the same time,” she said. “We treated Nuxalk knowledge as knowledge, not as something that needs outside validation or a debate.”

Hanuse also said care was essential when the film moved through painful testimony and histories of violence. “We were mindful of how pain is shown, keeping the history to what was essential and focusing the film on active work and healing,” she said.

Hanuse directed and produced CEREMONY and co-wrote it with Jessica Mayhew. The film features cinematography by Luke Connor and Jean-Philippe Marquis, editing by Erin Cumming and Sarah Taylor, animation by Jay White and animation artist Anuximana Jade Hanuse, music by Jesse Zubot, and sound by Joe Watts.

What CEREMONY leaves with viewers is a clearer sense of what stewardship, law, and survival actually mean when they are lived rather than abstracted. It doesn’t offer an easy narrative, but a serious reckoning with loss, endurance, and the responsibility of survival. It asks audiences to sit with what that requires. As Hanuse said, “What happens in Nuxalkulmc impacts us all.”