‘His life mattered’: Samuel Bird’s mom teams up with filmmaker to highlight Indigenous youth

Samuel Bird, a teen and member of Paul First Nation, in an undated photo. (Supplied/Alanna Bird)

It’s been one year, one month and three days since 14-year-old Samuel Bird’s disappearance in west Edmonton. His mother, Alanna, says she still feels like she’s waiting for him to come home.

“It still feels like yesterday, but part of me knows that he’s not here no more,” she told CTV News Edmonton. “It’s weird. Grief is weird.”

Samuel’s body was found in October 2025 after extensive community and police searches. He had been missing since June. His family and supporters rallied for months.

Police charged Bryan Farrell, 38, with second-degree murder in connection with the death.

The case was put over in court until November. In the meantime, Alanna is looking to keep her son’s name alive – and honour Indigenous teen lives in the process.

That’s why she’s now helping Indigenous filmmaker and musician Corben Bowen create a narrative feature film about Samuel’s life, more broadly, the story of Indigenous youth in Canada.

Every Day Gets Closer to Winter is still in early stages as the team looks for production funding, but there is an early trailer online.

“Of course, on news outlets, everybody announced that we found Sammy Bird. That went public,” Bowen recalls of the decision to take on the project in November. “Three, four weeks went by, then all of a sudden I get a call, and it’s from Alanna.”

His friend Dakota Bear, who operated at the helm of multiple community-led searches and advocacy efforts for the family, had put the two in contact.

“The film we’ve basically been writing throughout the past eight months is me basically talking to Alanna, talking to Samuel’s stepdad, talking to the sisters … Collecting all this information. It’s been a whirlwind,” Bowen said.

“Telling a human’s life within an hour and 30 minutes is impossible, so we’re just kind of taking the snapshot.”

Bowen says the idea is to follow Samuel through his coming-of-age and life leading up to his disappearance. It then picks up the story from Alanna’s perspective after he disappears.

It doesn’t get into the details of Farrell, he added, as the case is still active and he does not want to “disrespect Bryan’s family.”

“We want to connect with Samuel more than just a news headline and understand him as a human being, not just a character, so that someone in Australia, the Netherlands can go to the theatre and be like … ‘I relate to this person.’"

Samuel, remembered

Alanna, who stays active on social media as she continues to bring awareness to missing Indigenous youth, says she made the decision to keep talking easily.

“People have asked me why I agreed to make a film about my son, and the answer is simple: I never want another family to experience the heartbreak that mine has,” she said.

“I want to tell Sam’s story, show the people who he was. He was a skateboarder. He was a young Indigenous boy. His life mattered.”

Her favourite story to tell of Sam was a time when his family was watching a movie together in their apartment and he went to the washroom. He instead crawled out of the bathroom window, went around to the patio window, and waved to the family from there.

“He was so rambunctious. He did it to make us laugh … He didn’t care if he was in public or anything, he just did funny stuff.”

Bowen is dedicated to adding hundreds of names, sent to him by families who have gone through similar situations as the project has gained momentum, to the end credits of the film.

“If I’m not making this, someone needs to make this, and I think it’s as simple as that.”