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Wakening

Réalisé par Danis Goulet
Canada, 2013 (fiction, 9 minutes, couleurs, cri)

Description du film [en anglais] :
« In the near future, the environment has been destroyed and society suffocates under a brutal military occupation. A lone Cree wanderer Weesakechak searches an urban war zone to find the ancient and dangerous Weetigo to help fight against the occupiers. »
-- V tape (source)

Générique (partiel) :
Scénario : Tony Elliott
Produit par : Glen Wood, Jordana Aarons
Interprètes principaux : Gail Maurice, Sarah Podemski
Images : Daniel Grant
Montage images : Jonathan Eagan
Musique : Keegan Jessamy, Bryce Mitchell
Société de production : Viddywell Films
(sources)

Notes sur Wakening

(sources)

Citations de la réalisatrice [en anglais]

« I'd been thinking about oral storytelling traditions and characters I heard about growing up around the fire, and I challenged myself to place them in a kind of fantasy movie. [Wakening] felt like an experiment at the time. I would've stood amongst my film friends in the art-house circles and sheepishly said, 'Um, hi, I'm making a monster movie.' But I found the process liberating, and it opened up avenues and processes to talk about things that I wanted to say in completely different ways. It feels like a natural extension of Indigenous storytelling, too, and the way in which there are mystical things that are treated as just part of our world. »
-- Danis Goulet (source)

« Wakening [...] was part of a commission celebrating the Elgin and Winter Garden theaters' 100th anniversary. I'd been wanting to put characters from Cree oral traditions on screen. They are usually portrayed in quaint, folkloric ways, so I transported these characters into the future—a nod to their timelessness—and made a monster movie set in the Winter Garden in a dystopian future. »
-- Danis Goulet (source)

Citations sur Wakening [en anglais]

« A remarkable short film [...], Wakening builds an entire world in less than nine minutes, exploring the power of Indigenous legends, monsters and heroes in a richly realized post-apocalyptic future. »
-- Aviva Dove-Viebahn (source)

« The Cree cultural figures and practices depicted in the film [Wakening], in spite of the consistently violent measures taken against them, persist and are mobilized to combat the highly militarized occupying army. Moreover, the smile cast across Weesageechak's face at the end of the film implies Weetigo is now out in the world to turn its sights from the marginalized peoples it previously consumed and instead toward the occupiers, potentially presenting a new (Indigenous) story. »
-- Dallas Hunt (source)

« In Wakening, the Weetigo appears as a great horned elk with the power to recreate the forest, embodying the simultaneously creative and destructive potentialities of non-human agency. The 'occupiers' here are not only a metaphor for colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada, but they also stand in more generally for human-made systems (such as capitalism) that are responsible for the ongoing destruction of the planet. The expression on Wesakechak's face in the final shot represents the ambivalent possibility that out of catastrophe might come renewal. A kind of affective counter-intuition, the feeling that the viewer is left with is that the end of the world (or at least the end of the world as we know it) might actually be welcomed. »
-- Allison Mackey (source)

« Ultimately, there are two significant implications in understanding Wakening as ecohorror of dynamic temporality. First, such a reading continues the important work of revisioning the theoretical and critical boundaries of Western cinema. Goulet's play with audiences' expectations of horror's invitations to the weird challenge us all to recalibrate our sense of generic cinematic representation and its purpose. Relatedly, such readings highlight film's politics of emotion, its ability to generate 'affective alliances' that can potentially help us all reimagine our temporal and spatial engagements with the world at large. Such reimaginations are speculative windows into other ways of being, living, and sustaining healthy relations with the world. They are invitations to decolonize and thus heal the damage that has and is being wrought to human and nonhuman alike through neocolonial occupations that power climate change's accelerating catastrophes. »
-- Salma Monani (source)

« Wakening (2014) is an Indigenous-made science fiction story about prophesy and resistance. It uses oral tradition to image a future where even the most feared and abhorred beings in Neshnabé cosmology are better than settler-colonialism. »
-- Blaire Topash-Caldwell (source)

Bibliographie sur Wakening

Articles de revues scientifiques

Brèves parties d'articles de revue scientifiques

Articles de journaux, de revues grand public ou de sites d'information en ligne

Sites Web sur Wakening


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