Nikamowin (Song)
Directed byKevin Lee Burton
Written byKevin Lee Burton
CinematographyHelen Haig-Brown
Production
company
Indigenous Media Arts Group
Distributed byvTape
Release date
  • October 20, 2007 (2007-10-20)
Running time
12 minutes
CountryCanada
LanguagesEnglish
Cree

Nikamowin (Song) is a Canadian short documentary film, directed by Kevin Lee Burton and released in 2007.[1] 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.[2]

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.[3] 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.[3]

The film was named to the Toronto International Film Festival's annual year-end Canada's Top Ten list for 2008.[4]

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,[5] and the touring Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture in 2013.[6]

References

  1. ↑ Will Sloan, "Short and sweet". The Varsity, January 29, 2009.
  2. ↑ Eric L. Buffalohead and M. Elise Marubbio, eds. Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, and Theory. University Press of Kentucky, 2013. ISBN 9780813136653. p. 254.
  3. 1 2 "Metis Filmmaker Shane Belcourt Makes Feature Film Debut with Tkaronto Opening in Toronto at The Royal on August 15th for a Week Long Run". Nation Talk, August 13, 2008.
  4. ↑ "TIFF's Top Ten". Vancouver Sun, December 17, 2008.
  5. ↑ Lee Rosenbaum, "Artifacts to Artworks". Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2012.
  6. ↑ Andrew Forster, "Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture" in Art Papers Atlanta, February 2014.


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