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| Directed by Danis Goulet |
| Canada, 2013 (fiction, 9 minutes, colour, Cree) |
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Film Description: "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) |
| Film Credits (partial): | |
| Written by: | Tony Elliott |
| Produced by: | Glen Wood, Jordana Aarons |
| Principal Cast: | Gail Maurice, Sarah Podemski |
| Cinematography: | Daniel Grant |
| Film Editing: | Jonathan Eagan |
| Music: | Keegan Jessamy, Bryce Mitchell |
| Production Company: | Viddywell Films |
"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)
"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)
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