Ellyn Jade and Star Slade are young indigenous women forced on the run after a violent encounter with a predatory cop in the trailer for Eva Thomas’ Nika & Madison, whose world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival was announced on Wednesday.
Their flight from the law becomes a feminist crime thriller and a feature adaptation of Thomas’ earlier short film Redlights. “Am I under arrest?” Madison, played by Slade, who appeared opposite Nicholas Cage in Dream Scenario, asks a police officer from the backseat of a cruiser after being caught up in a bar brawl.
“No, I am driving you home,” the cop assures his passenger. But he’s not, and an attempted sexual assault against Madison follows and echoes real-life starlight tours in Canada, where police officers have picked up indigenous people at night, mostly men, and cruelly abandoned them on a city’s outskirts, often in freezing winter conditions.
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Lucky for Madison, her childhood friend Nika beats the officer off with a blow to his head, which leaves him hospitalized in a coma, and the two young women the focus of an escalating police manhunt. Here, Thomas focuses less on police brutality and a rigid justice system in Nika & Madison than what’s in the hearts of two young women feeling misunderstood and needing to escape to the big city on a journey of friendship and discovery.
First they elude the pursuing police on their reservation, and then the wilderness. Eventually they leave for Toronto, where Madison has been going to university. “No matter what happens, you are my sister. I love you,” Nika tells Madison as the trailer’s tension rises. “I love you too,” her bestie and protector responds.
In a director’s statement, Thomas wrote: “My goal with Nika & Madison is to create a journey that feels grounded and unflinching, one that centers Indigenous women not as victims or symbols, but as fully alive, complex people. I want audiences to feel not only the urgency of the issues at hand, but the depth of love and spirit that makes survival possible. I want them to root for Nika and Madison like they’d root for their own sisters.”
Kelly Boutsalis, the international programmer, Canadian features at TIFF told The Hollywood Reporter the indie drama looks to balance longstanding politics and greivances with personal and community discovery through the eyes of its two main characters: “The women in Nika & Madison cannot ignore the mistrust that they have in the police and judicial systems, based on years of mistreatment. That said, their relationship is definitely at the core of this film, coming back together after an unspoken rift, and working past their differences, in the aftermath of the event between Madison and the young cop. I loved how their community came together around them during this time.”
In Redlights, Jade appeared as Tina alongside Kaniehtiio Horn (who played the Deer Lady in Reservation Dogs) as best friend Amber. Thomas earlier co-directed the feature Aberdeen with Ryan Cooper. Nika & Madison marks the first feature Thomas directed on her own.
Nika & Madison also stars Amanda Brugel, Jennifer Podemski, Gail Maurice and Shawn Doyle. The feature, co-written by Michael McGowan, is also produced by Thomas and executive produced by Podemski, Paula Devonshire, Horn, Jade, Tyler Levine and Katelyn Cursio.
Nika & Madison will screen in the Discovery sidebar in Toronto and will get a local release by Game Theory Films. Canoe Film will be shopping the film to international buyers at TIFF.