Greetings: Te'skennongweronne - Yves Sioui Durand
2017 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Carlos Ferrand
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
Indigenous playwright Yves Sioui Durand meets the masks created for his plays over more than thirty years in a space outside time. Inhabited by Elders' spirits, the faces guide actors embodying First Peoples' memory.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a respectful portrait of Indigenous memory-work, but what actually gets under your skin is how Durand treats the masks as *agents*, not symbols—they're not illustrating the past, they're possessing the present, and that's genuinely unsettling in ways the doc establishment won't admit.
Ferrand's curation of this encounter—the formal rigor of positioning Durand in dialogue with his own creative lineage across three decades—situates this in a precise tradition of artist-archive cinema, where the essay form becomes a container for spiritual and cultural inheritance.
The decision to shoot this as a *meeting* rather than a retrospective changes everything: those masked presences are given actual spatial weight and response, and that single formal choice transforms what could've been archival into something alive and inhabited.