First Stories - His Guidance (Okiskinotahewewin)
2007 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Duane Linklater
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Drummer Rocky Morin recalls first feeling the drum's pull fifteen years ago and never looking back. His story underlines the need to stay connected to one's roots.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A drummer's origin story about staying rooted—it's the kind of reverent, straight-line narrative that usually puts me to sleep, but Linklater's refusal to sentimentalize the spiritual pull of the drum, letting silence and Rocky's presence do the heavy lifting, is quietly subversive in how it resists documentary cliché.
Linklater situates this portrait within a lineage of Indigenous documentary practice that honors oral tradition through restraint; the formal choice to let the drum's resonance speak alongside memory places this in direct conversation with NFB's best ethnographic work.
The decision to return to that first moment of the drum's pull not through archive or reenactment but through Rocky's body language and breath—the way Linklater lets us *feel* the fifteen-year grip rather than hear it explained—is the kind of invisible craft choice that transforms a personal essay into something universal.