Medoonak the Stormmaker
1975 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Les Krizsan
Genres: drama, family, fantasy
Tones: mythic, theatrical, whimsical
The Mi'kmaq legend of Medoonak, reckless ruler of winds and seas, is retold in mime, dance, and narration as he is persuaded to calm the waters so fishermen can feed their starving people.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1975 NFB folk adaptation in mime and dance sounds like exactly the kind of formally 'respectable' dead weight that gets programmed into family festivals—but the actual subversion here is that Krizsan commits *completely* to the theatrical artifice, treating mythic storytelling as formal problem rather than heritage tourism, which somehow makes it genuinely weird.
Krizsan's decision to filter Mi'kmaq legend through European dance and mime vocabulary—rather than documentary realism or contemporary indigenous aesthetics—creates productive formal tension that rewards close viewing; the film knows exactly what tradition it's working against and with, which is the mark of curatorial intelligence.
The structural choice to let the narration lead while mime and dance move underneath it—neither illustrating nor contradicting, but creating a third argument—is the kind of constraint that forces everything else to justify itself; on a 1975 NFB budget, that economy of means becomes the entire film's argument.