Like the lead character in the disturbing new film Unnatural & Accidental, Tantoo Cardinal knows what it’s like to search for your mother on skid row. The veteran First Nations actor, who’s appeared in everything from Dances With Wolves to Legends of the Fall during her 25-year career, was abandoned by her mother at a young age and raised by her grandmother in northern Alberta. In the ensuing years, and throughout her adulthood, she made many trips to reconnect with her mom in downtown Edmonton’s dingy single-occupancy hotel rooms. It’s a neighbourhood that bears a striking resemblance to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where Unnatural & Accidental, which opens tomorrow (December 1), was set and shot. The difference with the movie’s story line is that Cardinal, fortunately, found her mother each time.

“Sometimes she’d be really sick. But she was lucky in that there were others in her community there who were also from up around Slave Lake and northern Alberta, so they could keep an eye on each other,” explains Cardinal, who exudes the same serene yet powerful presence she does on film and on-stage. Sitting back in a wing chair in a Hotel Georgia lounge, she adds: “Without that community ‘telegraph’, I would never have found her.”

In Carl Bessai’s movie, there’s a role reversal: Cardinal plays the mother that successful young Rebecca (Carmen Moore) so desperately seeks. But as we know from the beginning, Rebecca is on a hopeless quest; we see Cardinal’s character only as a ghost. Still, she and other spirits seem to ultimately lead Rebecca to a murderer who is stalking the Downtown Eastside. Unnatural & Accidental is loosely based on a real-life case that regularly grabbed headlines in Vancouver from the late ’80s on. Gilbert Paul Jordan, a white barber, was linked to the deaths of 10 aboriginal women who died of alcohol poisoning either in his shop or in flophouse rooms. The film’s title refers to the words that police reports used to dismiss the killings, which were usually accompanied by sexual assaults. Jordan was only convicted of a single charge of manslaughter, in the 1987 death of Vanessa Lee Buckner, who was found dead in a hotel room with a blood-alcohol level more than 11 times the legal limit. In the movie, Callum Keith Rennie plays a drunken, violent rapist who preys on the Native women of the Downtown Eastside, often paying them to guzzle straight liquor before attacking them.

It’s a brutal depiction that echoes the current Robert Pickton trial for the murder of 22 women, and recent headlines about the indigenous women who have disappeared along the Highway of Tears in northern B.C. The deeply political Cardinal says it’s an all-too-common story that needs to be addressed, once and for all.

Violent as the movie’s subject matter is, “For me, it has peace; it was a liberation,” Cardinal contends. Citing a 1996 federal report that says indigenous women between the ages of 25 and 44 are five times more likely than other women in the same age group to die as a result of violence, she grows quietly impassioned. “When no one would face these issues was when I was angriest.…I’m much healthier inside now that we’ve had the opportunity to tell the story. I think a lot of anger that floats around has to do with the lies and the denials and the deceit. Let’s get it out in the open and let it blow away.

“I’m from Alberta, and we’ve got our own serial killers over the mountain. But you see Native women getting killed all the time, and we always say, ‘If that was a white girl, it would have hit the front page.’ It’s been going on for so long.”

That’s certainly apparent to Marie Clements, the movie’s Métis screenwriter, who has been following the subject closely ever since she debuted The Unnatural and Accidental Women as a play at a staged reading at Vancouver’s now-defunct Women in View Festival in 1997. Developed in workshops, it went on to premiere at the Firehall Arts Centre in November 2000, and has been produced across the country.

“They say that you have to tell a story in as many different ways as you can for people to believe it. That’s been the case with this play and this film,” says the articulate artist, in a separate interview in a Vancouver hotel suite. “But that also extends to the fact that it’s not an isolated incident. In the 10 years since I started all this, we’ve had Pickton, the Highway of Tears… It seems that we’re surrounded by it all the time—and that we’re not doing what we should be to stop this.”

Clements hopes the film can get across the humanity of the victims, whether it’s the fact that Cardinal’s character Rita is a mother with a daughter who needs to reconnect with her to feel whole, or that another woman, a prostitute, cherishes a framed picture of the two little boys she one day hopes to be a good parent to.

Clements’s first step out of the theatre realm and into the world of movie came naturally: “I tend to write really imagistically—there’s a natural connection to film because image has always been my starting point.”

The movie Unnatural & Accidental departs from the play in a number of ways. Bessai and Clements have ramped up the pace and brought a thriller treatment to the subject matter. But the always expressionistic Bessai (Lola, Emile) has also given the film a stylized look that captures the play’s sense of mysticism. “It’s very raw, but there is a beauty to it—a juxtaposition between what’s incredibly beautiful and what’s incredibly brutal,” Clements says.

For Cardinal, the film evokes a sense of the ancient spiritualism that fed her people—and that has allowed them to survive. She now feels deeply connected to what she calls the “old ceremonies” that were lost to her generation but that she belatedly learned her own mother and grandmother practised while living in the bush of northern Alberta. “There was that fear put into people by the church that the Indian ways were of the devil. People were afraid to even be a part of the ceremony. You have to renew that intrinsic faith—it’s a part of our roots,” she says, then adds with a wry smile: “I think that’s why white people are so fucked up: they forgot where they came from.”

As for Clements, she has an almost spiritual take on Jordan himself. After a decade of following his case and finding out that Jordan was still being picked up by police for the same disturbing behaviours, she heard he had died this past July. For Clements, his death, and the completion of the movie, may finally have brought her to the end of her long relationship with this painful subject.

“It was a relief when I heard he had died—alone in a hotel room,” she says, and then conjures an ending for him that is not entirely unlike her film’s finale: “I kind of say, ‘Maybe the women were there somewhere,’ and that the story will continue on another level that is not of his choosing.”