Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes)
2018 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Amanda Strong
Genres: animation, fantasy, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
A young Indigenous genderfluid person and a Sasquatch shape-shifter harvest maple sap in the city, continuing ancestral work while seeing ghosts of time embedded in the landscape.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Strong leans into the genuinely unsettling—a Sasquatch co-harvester, ghosts haunting a city landscape—but the film's real subversion is quieter: it refuses the climactic revelation, the explanation, the dramatic confrontation most shorts would milk from this premise. That restraint is what makes it dangerous.
The animation itself—rotoscoped, textured, deliberately flat in places—situates this in a lineage of Indigenous experimental cinema while conversing with contemporary magical realism in form; the way Strong layers temporal ghosts into the mise-en-scène recalls both Chantal Akerman's durational patience and the visual strategies of Indigenous futurism.
The entire film turns on a single directorial choice: to treat the Sasquatch not as spectacle but as mundane collaborator, which means the animation flattens the fantastical and elevates the intimate—suddenly the small, repetitive gesture of tapping trees becomes the film's emotional core, and that shift in scale is what makes 20 minutes feel like an entire philosophy.