Okimah
1998 · 50m · Canada
Directed by Paul M. Rickard
Genres: documentary, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
Cree filmmaker Paul Rickard joins his own family for a fall goose hunt on the James Bay coast, where the hunt provides food and teaches younger generations Cree skills, culture and ethics.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Rickard's refusal to exoticize or sentimentalize the hunt—treating it as neither spiritual performance nor ecological parable—is genuinely subversive; most films about Indigenous life can't resist one or the other, and he just... doesn't.
A masterwork of restraint that locates itself squarely in the essay-film tradition of Flaherty and beyond, where formal observation and cultural transmission become inseparable—the 50 minutes unfold with the patience of ritual itself.
The decision to let the rhythm of the hunt dictate the editing rather than impose narrative momentum transforms what could be ethnographic documentation into something alive; watch how Rickard cuts away from the kill to the children's faces, and the whole film's ethics crystallize in a single choice.