The APTN and CBC documentary The Good Canadian looks beyond Canada’s past to capture how its current systems and the legacy of the Indian Act work to continue the oppression of First Nations people in the country.

The film is written and directed by David Paperny, director of the Oscar-nominated 1993 doc The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter, and award-winning documentary producer Leena Minifie. It is produced by Minifie and Paperny’s Great Stories Films in association with Stories First.

The Good Canadian largely presents perspectives from non-Indigenous Canadians, looking at their experience within the bureaucratic system and the idea of being complicit in the genocide of First Nations people and culture.

“A lot of the time in journalism, and in my history, I’m talking to Indigenous people first, talking to victims,” Minifie tells Playback Daily. “When you turn the lens and you’re talking to [non-Indigenous people], they have a voice and sometimes more trust with non-Indigenous Canadians. They get to say things that they’ve seen, which nobody else has heard before because nobody else has asked them.”

The doc premieres on APTN and CBC on Tuesday (Sept. 30) as part of the broadcasters’ programming for the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It’s already garnering accolades, with Minifie winning the Kevin Tierney Emerging Producer Indiescreen Award from the Canadian Media Producers Association this year.

Financing and development

The concept for The Good Canadian came from a single interaction. Back in summer 2021, Paperny approached Gitxsan activist Cindy Blackstock (pictured) about doing a documentary around her advocacy work in welfare for First Nations children in Canada. In response, Blackstock said he should instead turn his camera around and ask non-Indigenous settlers what they have done to help First Nations communities.

“She actually said, ‘David, what will be written on your gravestone?’,” recalls Paperny. “‘What will your grandchildren say if they ask you some day, Grandpa, what did you do when injustices were happening in your time against Indigenous people?'”

Paperny soon got to work, bringing on executive producer Sarah Jane Flynn (who is now executive producer of original programming at Knowledge Network) and creating a sizzle reel and pitch document to attract buyers and financiers, which was completed in early spring 2022.

During Hot Docs that year, Paperny met with Robin Mirsky, executive director of the Rogers Group of Funds, and Sue Biely, executive director of Story Money Impact, and told them about the doc.

“They said, ‘David, you can’t make this film without a strong Indigenous partner. Are you crazy?’ I said, ‘OK, anyone in mind?’ And they both immediately said, ‘You gotta talk to Leena Minifie,'” he says.

At the time, Minifie had just finished working on the docuseries British Columbia: An Untold History (Screen Siren Pictures), which unearthed underrepresented and marginalized perspectives from B.C.’s past. She says she was instantly drawn to the topic, since it was something she wanted to pursue early on in her career as a journalist, but had not been permitted to.

Things really started to come together in 2023. Minifie and Paperny met with Adam Garnet Jones, APTN’s director of TV content and special events, at the Toronto International Film Festival. The broadcaster quickly came on board to help develop the doc, allowing the producers to unlock development funding from the Canada Media Fund.

“[Minifie] was having a hard time getting any interest, I think because the film does really focus on some of the intricacies of the bureaucracy,” says Jones. “On the page, it doesn’t look like that sexy of an angle, but … it’s a really important way of looking at these issues and hearing from people who we haven’t heard from before, the people who participate in administering and implementing these policies. I was excited about where the project was going.”

With APTN on board, the next step was finding a second broadcaster to bolster the financing and amplify the film’s reach.

“[APTN] only has a certain amount of money to trigger docs, so we really wanted her to find another broadcaster to support it,” says Jones. “We felt like, as a reconciliation project, it was important to have a non-Indigenous broadcaster supporting the film and making sure that it has a platform outside of APTN. That’s when those conversations with CBC started.”

For CBC, the doc was overseen by Nic Meloney, executive in charge of production, unscripted content.

“Part of our role is recognizing the rarity of a filmmaking team like this, and understanding the work that they were going to do throughout production,” he says, referring to the volume of research and level of journalism involved, and making it accessible to general audiences. “Luckily, it was brought to us from two exceptionally skilled filmmakers, an incredible executive producer and a very talented crew; we made a beautiful film.”

At that stage, CBC helped fund the rest of the project’s development, along with support from Creative BC and Rogers via the Rogers Indigenous Film Fund.

Research on the documentary was already underway at that point. The team brought on several researchers, including Vancouver-based journalist Chantelle Bellrichard, who had worked on the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s; Jennifer Chiu, who had worked with Minifie on British Columbia: An Untold History; data journalist Anna Mehler Paperny, daughter of Paperny and his producing partner Audrey Mehler; editor and activist Derrick O’Keefe; and APTN journalist Paul Barnsley.

Minifie says that by the time they went into pre-production in spring 2024 they had reached out to roughly 60 possible interview subjects for the project, adding that it took about 12 to 16 months to source everyone. Blackstock is among the Indigenous participants in the doc.

The biggest piece of production financing came through the Indigenous Screen Office, according to Minifie. The team was able to tap into three Rogers funds – the Cable Network Fund, Documentary Fund and Telefund – as well as additional financing from Creative BC’s Production Program.

Minifie says the final budget landed in the range of $1 million to $1.5 million.

Production and post-production

Principal photography for The Good Canadian began in May 2024. The producers got to work filming interviews, which they estimate took an average of five to six hours per subject.

“Canadians are quite polite and like to tell you the surface things first,” says Minifie. “[The lengthy interviews] allowed us to get past people’s surface [answers] and go deep with them.”

Paperny says the duo would often work in tandem for the interviews, either taking turns so as to not tire themselves out, or interviewing as a pair. “We’d sometimes play good cop/bad cop, and one of us would play the nice interviewer,” he adds.

The documentary is bookended by one particularly affecting account from a social worker named Corina, the only person who was interviewed twice in the filming process. The producers stayed in contact after initially speaking with her in 2024, and in spring 2025 she notified them that a birth alert – an illegal practice where hospital staff alert child welfare workers about the birth of a First Nations child, often leading to the child being forcibly removed from their mother – had just occurred at a hospital. The documentary includes footage of the incident.

“She trusted us with the story, she trusted us with the footage and she came on camera at the risk of her own job,” says Paperny. “We were in a position to capture the story because of that long-term relationship. It attests to the best aspect of documentary filmmaking when you can establish a relationship, gain their trust, and follow up when they’re experiencing that kind of unspeakable volatility in their lives.”

Meloney recalls that moment in the making of the doc. “That’s why a documentary is so incredible, because it gives you that firsthand look at the grim reality sometimes, especially in this kind of subject matter,” he says, calling the birth alert scene one of the most “emotionally urgent narrative threads” in the film. “It wasn’t an intention to start and finish the film with that and have that thread throughout; it happened organically.”

Paperny says the team sourced hundreds of documents and archival footage in the research and production stages, which tapped into a healthy amount of the budget in terms of working with an archivist and a lawyer to ensure they had the usage rights.

Principal photography ended in November 2024, and they quickly went into an eight-month editing process, finishing in July. Along the way they filmed some additional footage, including Corina’s second interview.

Sales and marketing

Great Stories Films and Stories First hold distribution rights to the documentary outside of Canada, with APTN and CBC licensing broadcast and streaming rights domestically.

Minifie says the companies are looking at an international film festival run after the doc airs in Canada, with a particular focus on festivals concerned with human rights and the topic of genocide. She estimates that it will take some time to really get the film out there internationally, since Canada has a strong reputation globally and it can be “hard to compute” that Canada isn’t “perfect.”

The companies also hold educational rights to the doc and are in the process of applying for non-profit grants, as well as film marketing grants, to finance an impact campaign to run long after the doc’s premiere.

“[The documentary] makes all of us complicit, asking ourselves, asking myself, ‘Am I a good Canadian? What makes me a good Canadian?’ I didn’t know about any of this before I met Cindy in the summer of 2021,” says Paperny. “Could I ever have called myself a good Canadian?”

Image courtesy of APTN