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Canadian director Dawn Wilkinson had a very reliable source for her first feature Devotion: herself. The film tells the story of 11-year old Alice, a bi-racial girl who loses her mother due to her dad’s drunk driving and has to struggle not just with the loss of a parent, but also her dad’s alcoholism, and racism in a largely white community. Like Alice, Wilkinson grew up in a small community short on diversity. “I experienced racism as a kind of shock…and I think part of the shock was that my mother and aunt were both white and I loved them and they loved me. The alcoholism is also something my family experienced,” Wilkinson explains. The one big twist in the story is the death of Alice’s mother in a car accident, something that she wanted to explore because of the closeness of her relationship to her mother.

Devotion is a emotionally complex and tangled exploration of loss, race and family which wouldn’t have been possible without the impressive work of teen actor Jasmine Richards, who makes her feature debut with this film. It also marks the arrival of a new and exciting voice in Canadian cinema. The film has won the Tony Stoltz Completion award and the 2005 Star! Audience Award at Toronto’s Reel World Film Festival. The film will be screening at the San Francisco Black Film Festival in June and the Atlanta Pan-African Festival in July.