Nbisiing
2020 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Cole Forrest
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
Returning from Toronto to North Bay during the pandemic, a young man fears he has lost his community and seeks guidance from the lake, land, medicines and berries to reconnect with his ancestors.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Looks like a spiritual homecoming film on the surface, but Cole Forrest actually refuses the expected catharsis—the lake doesn't answer, the ancestors stay quiet, and that refusal is where the real subversion lives.
Nbisiing operates within the essay film tradition while anchoring itself in Anishinaabek knowledge systems; the formal restraint—how it lets land and medicine speak rather than impose—sits in conversation with structural ethnographic cinema and Indigenous documentary lineages.
The film's entire emotional weight rests on a single formal choice: the decision to let natural sound and silence do the ancestral work, which turns a four-minute piece into something that feels both intimate and cosmically patient.