Nikamowin (Song) (2007)
- Original title
- Nikamowin
- Directed by
- Kevin Lee Burton
- Genre
- Documentary
- Country
- Canada
- Runtime
- 11 min
- Elsewhere
- IMDb
The catalogue in 3D
The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.
How it feels
A man asks another why he cannot speak Cree. The film uses sampled and looped Cree language dialogue to create a beatboxing track. It shows footage from Vancouver and a rural community, edited to suggest back and forth travel between those worlds.
contemplativeexperimentalrhythmicmeditativeurbanruralrepetitivehypnotic
What happens
Nikamowin (Song) is a Canadian short documentary film, directed by Kevin Lee Burton and released in 2007. A meditation on the importance of language in defining personal identity, the film opens with a brief English language conversation in which one man asks another one why he cannot speak Cree, before transitioning into Cree language dialogue sampled and looped back to create a beatboxing track; it is visually accompanied by footage from both Vancouver and Burton's hometown of Gods Lake Narrows, similarly looped back and edited to suggest repeated back and forth travel between the urban and rural worlds. The film premiered at the 2007 imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, where it won the award for Best Indigenous Language Production and the Kent Monkman Award for Best Experimental/Innovation in Storytelling. It was subsequently screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and as the opening film to some commercial screenings of Shane Belcourt's feature film Tkaronto in 2008. The film was named to the Toronto International Film Festival's annual year-end Canada's Top Ten list for 2008. It was later included in various exhibitions of indigenous North American art, including Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in 2012, and the touring Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture in 2013. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)
More like this
Writing the Land (2007)
Reel Injun (2009)
Those Who Come, Will Hear (2017)
Tkaronto (2007)
Happiness Bound (2007)
The Amendment (2007)
Late Fragment (2007)
A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman (2007)- More like this film, on a shelf you can walk up to.It's the lit case on the top shelf.