Indigenous actor Carla-Rae knows the devastation first-hand. For her, it was her father’s two sisters who were legally abducted from their home and placed in Canadian boarding schools. Children who, at that very moment, were essentially orphaned by their government.

“And my father fought in War II,” Carla-Rae said softly this week in Denver. “He was part of the fleet that landed on Omaha Beach.”

Every day of her life, “I saw the pain in my father’s eyes,” said Carla-Rae, who just doesn’t get it. Government-enforced hate. “We are all just a couple of degrees away in DNA,” she said, “but we don’t acknowledge each other as one.”

Carla-Rae is part of a remarkable new yet age-old story called “Bones of Crows,” which chronicles the relentless hardships endured by three generations of one Cree family after a happily married rural couple’s three children are jerked from them in 1930 and placed in a Catholic residential school system where, for more than a century, children routinely experienced starvation, racism, torture and sexual abuse.

Creator Marie Clements first made “Bones of Crows” as a film, but she is now reimagining it as an epic, five-part TV series. The first two episodes were screened in Denver last week as part of  SeriesFest, a kind of film festival for upcoming episodic television.

Carla-Rae is hardly alone in her direct bloodline to the true “Bones of Crows” story. Every single member of the Canadian cast and crew, said Clements, has family who were taken and sent to one of those residential schools.

From the 1880s through the 1990s, the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 ​Indigenous children from their homes. And by that, I mean officers ripped them screaming from the arms of parents who were threatened with imprisonment or worse if they did not sign their children over. The point, they said then, was to assimilate them – which really meant to neutralize them.

These houses of horror were part of a systematic strategy to excise children from their languages, customs, traditions and memories. It was a both cultural and literal genocide – which the “Bones of Crows” creative team learned in devastatingly real time.

In 2021, the remains of 215 Indigenous children, some as young as 3, were finally discovered in a mass grave outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. That’s where Clements had just filmed some of the most wrenching scenes in “Bones of Crows.”

“We had chosen that location a year before the children were found,” she said. Her team was just feet from where a memorial to the dead now stands.

“That discovery sent ripple effects throughout the world,” said Executive Producer Christine Haebler. “And this film and this series will send its own ripple effects throughout the world as well.”

That’s because this is not just a Canadian story. In the U.S., President Ulysses S. Grant signed the 1869 Indian Peace Policy, which led to more than 350 federally-run boarding schools for Native American children. Those schools were ostensibly an attempt “to create a permanent peace,” Grant said at the time. At least three of them were in Colorado – in Grand Junction, Ignacio and Durango. According to the 2020 Census, about 100,000 people living in Colorado today identify as being from one of 200 native tribes.

In “Bones of Crows” when authorities arrive without notice at the family’s isolated prairie home and force the parents to sign their three children over to the government, it is a tipped domino that will affect every day forward not only for young Aline Spears and her two siblings, but for their parents and, eventually, their own children and grandchildren.

At this brutal, visceral moment, one cannot help but simultaneously conjure Nazis rounding up Jewish families and sending them to death camps. Asian Americans being forcibly moved to internment camps. Mexican children being ripped from their parents at the U.S. border. This recurring scene is one of the most sickeningly universal, recognizable moments in human history, and one we have seen play out again and again throughout the centuries. This is the world’s shame.

“If you want to change the world, tell a story through film or television,” Jennifer Loren, senior director at Cherokee Film, said after the screening. “Bones of Crows” is the kind of television that will change the world – once the world actually sees it. But that’s the nature of SeriesFest – no one knows exactly when you are going to be able to see it.

But once you do, trust me: It will get inside your bones.

All ‘Grown’ up

A definite highlight of SeriesFest was a special screening of the teen coming-of-age series “Grown” that was held exclusively for students from Denver’s North and South high schools. The series, created by Jocko Sims (he played Dr. Floyd Reynolds on the NBC drama “New Amsterdam”), centers on a fatherless 14-year-old from Brooklyn named Rogelio. It’s a proven genre, but we’ve never seen a show like “My So-Called Life” telling the experiences of young kids of color.

Young actors Josiah Gabriel, Giovanni Cristoff and Angela Mejia-Loggia, each on the cusp of inevitable stardom, were soaking up every SeriesFest moment in Denver. But the opportunity to screen “Grown” for fellow teens, mostly of color – and speak to them afterward – was a high point of their week. They presented as living examples that dreams come true.

“I am a senior in high school myself, so, to be honest, I just want to influence young people,” Gabriel told the Denver Gazette. “I want them to push forward no matter what they are going through. I want them to know it’s never too late to follow your dreams, no matter how hard it might seem.”

Echoed Giovanni Cristoff (talk about a movie star name): “We’re all the same age. We’re doing it – and so can you. We’re all the future.”

SeriesFest takes place at the Sie Film Center, just across the street from two recent shootings at Denver East High School. The contrast was not lost on Sims.

“We are living in a horrible time for kids in some ways, but the thing that keeps us going, and the thing that has always prevailed throughout the centuries is art,” Sims said. “Art represents an escape – and that’s what we wanted to do for the students in Denver. We wanted to provide something to give them hope. Something to inspire them to create. My message to them is to keep your heads up, keep moving forward, and keep art alive.”

Impact of the writers’ strike

Even here in little old Denver, SeriesFest was the first major entertainment event impacted by the Writers Guild of America strike. The union does not allow members to make “promotional appearances” during a strike. So most every showrunner, writer or actor who was scheduled to appear at any panel or talkback respectfully backed out. “We have always honored the critical and remarkable work of writers and we stand in solidarity with them,” said Randi Kleiner, co-founder and CEO of SeriesFest.

Briefly …

Perhaps the most packed SeriesFest event was not a TV screening at all. It was for a taping of the new podcast “Chinwag,” co-hosted by Academy Award-nominated actor Paul Giamatti (“Cinderella Man”) and brainiac Stephen Asma. Before a free-flowing conversation on the plausibility of “starseed” – that, apparently, is a new group of people who believe they’re aliens who have come to Earth to help heal the planet – Giamatti said he hadn’t been to Denver in 35 years. But he distinctly remembers visiting the Denver Zoo that day. The famously disheveled celebrity said a nice woman approached him there and asked how he was doing. Giamatti said, “Great!” and the woman, thinking he surely must have been down on his luck, gave him a buck.

I have to admit, I still don’t completely get the SeriesFest programming rules. I assumed everything being screened here, like “Bones of Crow,” has not yet secured distribution. But then I went to a screening of the first two episodes of “A Small Light” – that’s a sensationally humanizing portrayal of Miep Gies, the woman who bravely hid Otto Frank and his family from the Nazis for two years. But when I got home, I came across the series on Hulu and immediately binged the rest of it … so go figure. (It’s great.)

A hostile, rainy sendoff

SeriesFest culminated Wednesday with a closing-night, all-comedy lineup at Red Rocks that was, in a word, miserable, as much of the metro area was under a tornado alert. The plan was for Jay Pharoah, Adam Ray and Joel McHale to do some standup before bringing on headliner Chelsea Handler.

But, this being SeriesFest, it made perfect sense for the program to include a screening of a short episode from McHale’s new FOX comedy series, “Animal Control” – which, to be honest, is thoroughly charming. (I mean, all those animals … c’mon!) But the mood at soggy Red Rocks was downright hostile, and the crowd of about 7,000 that was being relentlessly pelted with an uncharacteristically hard Colorado rain wanted nothing to do with cute critters on this night. It wanted Chelsea Handler.

As the episode played on the big screen, part of the crowd just started making guttural noises like they were at a Premier League football match. Others just kept endlessly screaming, “Turn It Off”  – until organizers actually did. Seriously, they cut off the episode midstream. And, talk about awkward – McHale then had to come back out and  talk to them. But despite what could only be described as a tense atmosphere, McHale won the day, thanking the crowd for being what he called “the most honest focus group of my life.” The crowd lightened up – but the skies, alas, did not. But the last laugh goes to McHale. “Animal Control,” which debuted in February, is already a big hit – and renewed for a second season.

SERIESFEST 2023 WINNERS

INDEPENDENT PILOT: DRAMA 

Best Pilot: “Humanized.” Director: Colin Sevely-Ortiz. Writer: Gabriel Guimaraes.

Best Director: Elias Plagianos, “Hit Man”

Best Performance: Garland Scott, “Puncher’s Chance”

Best Supporting Performance: Key Taw, “Humanized”

INDEPENDENT PILOT: COMEDY

Best Pilot: “Chanshi.” Director: Mickey Triest and Aharon Geva. Writer: Aleeza Chanowitz.

Best Director: Sophia Peer, “Who’s Annie?”

Best Performance: Aleeza Chanowitz, “Chanshi”

Best International Comedy: “Our Big Punjabi Family”

INDEPENDENT PILOT: UNSCRIPTED       

Best Pilot: “The Big Idea.” Directors: Sarah Klein and Tom Mason.

Best Director: Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, “The Big Idea”

DIGITAL SHORTS 

Best Drama: “Frederick Douglass Boulevard”

Best Comedy: “Pear”

Best Director: Washington Kirk, “Frederick Douglass Boulevard”

Best Writer: Madeline Mahoney and Peter Molesworth, “Pear”

Best Performance in a Drama: Washington Kirk, “Frederick Douglass Boulevard”

Best International Digital Short: “Krystal Klairvoyant”

Best Cinematography: Bryan Redding, “Black Creek”

LATE NIGHT 

Best Pilot: “One Million Girls”

PITCH-A-THON  

Winner: “The Death Doula.” Creator:  Brittany Ballard

AUDIENCE AWARD WINNERS

Best Drama Pilot: “I Didn’t Mean To Go Mental”

Best Comedy Pilot: “Grown”

Digital Short Series: “All At Once”

Late Night: “Easily Solved Mysteries”

Best International Pilot: “Bones of Crows”