Medicine Women — Maskihkiwiskwêw — is an original Indigenous supernatural drama created and written by Robert Slinn, produced by Sinfull Studios in Regina, Saskatchewan. It is the studio’s first original series: a story about a young Cree woman who, after a profound loss, trains as a medicine woman and hunts the creatures that cross over from the spirit world. The teaser is out, it is gaining real traction, and building this project is one of the most deliberate decisions this studio has made.
Why Build Original IP at All?
Client work and crew work are honest, and we do a lot of both. But they do not accumulate into something that belongs to the studio. Every production company eventually asks the same question: what is ours? What story are we telling when nobody hired us to tell it? For Sinfull Studios, the answer is Medicine Women.
Original IP is a long game. It takes longer, costs more relative to return in the short term, and there is no client writing a cheque at the end of each milestone. What you get instead is ownership — creative, commercial, and reputational. You build something that can travel, that can grow, and that represents what the studio actually believes film is capable of doing.
Why This Story?
I am from this place. Saskatchewan is where I work, where I have built this studio, and where this story comes from. The prairie carries a specific kind of mythology — older and stranger than most people who live here realize — and Cree cosmology is part of that. The idea of a young woman who crosses into a role of healer and protector, who faces what comes through from the spirit world, is not a concept I invented to seem interesting. It is rooted in a tradition that belongs to this land.
Writing this series has meant sitting with that responsibility carefully. I am not from the Cree Nation, and I have not claimed otherwise. What I have done is approach the material with the seriousness it requires — using Maskihkiwiskwêw, the Cree word for medicine woman, as the series’ true name, and making sure the story reflects the weight of what a role like that means in that tradition. This is not genre dressing. This is the story.
Why Saskatchewan as the Setting?
Prairie landscapes are underrepresented in Canadian drama, and nearly absent from supernatural and genre storytelling. That absence is strange, because there is nothing neutral about a Saskatchewan sky or an open stretch of land that runs flat to the horizon. It has its own tension. It has its own silence. That geography belongs in this kind of story — not as backdrop, but as a force in the narrative.
Shooting here also means we are telling a story from the place it belongs, with the resources and relationships we have built here over years of production work. That matters practically and it matters creatively.
What Production Looks Like at This Stage
The studio shoots on real film and video, with drone and aerial capability, and we have Unreal Engine and virtual production tools in our toolkit. Medicine Women is a series that can use all of that. The supernatural elements of the story — what crosses from the spirit world — give us creative reason to work at the edge of what regional production can do technically.
The teaser is out and has been picking up real views in a short window, which tells us the premise is landing with people who did not already know us. That is useful information. The series is in development, and the teaser is the first public proof of what the tone and world look like.
What the Long Game Looks Like
A regional studio that only executes other people’s visions is useful, but it is not irreplaceable. A studio that originates — that builds stories that could only come from where it is and what it knows — has a reason to exist that is harder to replicate.
Medicine Women is the studio’s argument for what Saskatchewan film can be. It is not a local-interest piece or a heritage project. It is a genre series with real dramatic stakes, grounded in a specific Indigenous tradition, made by a studio that is trying to do the full job — writing, producing, shooting — not just the hired portion of it.
Where Things Stand
The teaser is public. The series is in active development. If this is the kind of story you have been waiting to see come out of the prairies, I would say we are building it with exactly that audience in mind — people who know that the best stories about this land have not been told yet, and who are willing to wait for them to be done right.
Watch the teaser and follow the series on the Medicine Women page at Sinfull Studios.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Medicine Women about?
Medicine Women — Maskihkiwiskwêw — is an original Indigenous supernatural drama created and written by Robert Slinn of Sinfull Studios in Regina, Saskatchewan. The series follows a young Cree woman who, after a profound loss, trains as a medicine woman and hunts the creatures that cross over from the spirit world. A teaser is available on YouTube and the series is in active development.
Is Medicine Women a Sinfull Studios original production?
Yes. Medicine Women is the first original series created and produced by Sinfull Studios, a film and video production studio based in Regina, Saskatchewan. It represents the studio’s move into originating its own intellectual property rather than exclusively doing client and crew production work.
Where is Medicine Women filmed?
Medicine Women is set and shot in Saskatchewan, Canada. Sinfull Studios is based in Regina and shoots on real film and video, with drone, aerial, and Unreal Engine virtual production capabilities. The prairie landscape of Saskatchewan is an intentional and integral part of the series’ tone and setting.
