There is a moment, fairly early in Ceremony, when an animated bear hugs a human while a flock of seagulls gathers nearby. It is a watercolour memory of what the riverbanks of the Bella Coola Valley used to look like during ooligan season. When the small fish returned in such numbers that people, birds, and bears all gathered in celebration. It is also, in its quiet way, a small portrait of the Nuxalk worldview: that humans, animals, land, and water are not separate things but parts of the same living whole. Then the fish stop coming, and the picture cracks open.

Slts’lani Banchi Hanuse’s feature documentary, which won the Audience Award in the Documentary Spotlight section at SXSW 2026, took more than a decade to make, and that patience is felt in every frame. Hanuse, a Nuxalk filmmaker and co-founder of Nuxalk Radio, builds her film around the radio station itself, using its broadcasts as a thread that pulls together community testimony, archival footage, and some of the most gorgeous nature photography of any film this year. The result feels less like a lecture and more like a long, careful conversation.

On its surface, the hook is ecological. The ooligan, a small oily fish also known as the candlefish, once ran up the Bella Coola River in such overwhelming numbers that they sustained the Nuxalk for millennia. Families gathered to render ooligan grease. Throwback footage from earlier decades, woven in with extraordinary care, captures the joy of communal harvest, with people, seagulls, and bears all sharing the riverbank. Then, one season, the ooligan failed to arrive. Ceremony lets the people who lived through that loss describe what it took with them. One man recalls that his father missed the final catch by a matter of days. Another says simply, in a line that lands like a stone, that the loss was not just about a fish but about a people and a territory.

What Hanuse does so deftly is refuse to keep this story narrow. The disappearance of the ooligan is a doorway, and what lies on the other side of it is harder. Through Nuxalk Radio segments and quiet archival passages, the film walks viewers through the arrival of Norwegian settlers in the Bella Coola Valley in the late 1800s, the absurdly small reserve the Nuxalk were forced onto, and the rewriting of that history into a tidy fiction of peaceful settlement. Most devastatingly, Ceremony surfaces the 1862 smallpox epidemic as an act of deliberate biological warfare, with settlers going door to door to spread the disease. The Nuxalk population, which oral histories place in the tens of thousands before contact, was reduced to a few hundred survivors. The film does not dwell on this material to traumatize. It dwells on it because, as the elders on Nuxalk Radio make clear, you cannot understand a vanished fish without understanding a vanished people.

Visually, Ceremony is on another tier. Sweeping drone shots glide over fjords and snowmelt rivers, while long takes hold of turquoise water beneath skies of clean aqua and deep blue, the kind that feel almost untouched. Tight close-ups find the textures, moss, lichen, and rippling current that most documentaries don’t have the patience for. Threaded through it all are stretches of hand-painted watercolour animation that float in and out of the film like dreams, illustrating origin stories and lost rituals with a tenderness live action could never capture. Underneath sits an ambient soundtrack that knows when to recede and when to swell, never overplaying its hand.

The film’s emotional anchor is the brother-and-sister team of Megan and Jason, who have devoted their adult lives to the ooligan’s return. Their father raised them on the river and taught them what their territory meant, an inheritance Ceremony lets speak for itself through a tender Nuxalk Radio segment. By the time the film reaches its final stretch, with new life arriving in more than one form, Ceremony has earned the hope it is offering. It is not a naive hope. It is the kind built from generations that refuse to disappear.

For a story this heavy, Ceremony is remarkably warm. Older Nuxalk voices on the radio return again and again to a message of self-love and care for one another, and the film carries that ethic into its own form. It is one of the best Canadian documentaries of the year, and one of the most beautiful.

Ceremony premiered at SXSW 2026 and will have its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs 2026 on April 30 and May 1. Visit the official film page for other upcoming screenings.