Santa Fe Film Festival 2008

This film highlights a linguistic soundscape comprised of the deconstruction and reconstruction of Cree narration dances with various manipulated landscapes. This audiovisual experiment begs questions of how languages exist, emerge, and survive. The altered and constructed Cree that the director speaks in this film is not one that conforms to the traditional constructs of the Cree language, but it does resonate deeply enough to make us feel like we are hearing something that we truly understand—a message that asks dying-language speakers to hear their inner song of pride and bring back the language. Kevin Lee Burton is a director, film festival programmer, and freelance camera operator who is Swampy Cree from God’s Lake Narrows, Manitoba.