pahkwêsikan sâkihitowin: Bannock is Love
2026 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Tyra Delver
Genres: documentary, essay film, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
Bannock — made in a mother's kitchen, over the fire, in a Winnipeg restaurant — as a vessel of Indigenous knowledge and love.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a food documentary to be earnest and warm—Delver flips that by using bannock as a Trojan horse for something genuinely unsettling about knowledge, bodies, and what gets lost in translation, which most docs are too comfortable to touch.
The essay film tradition of materializing abstraction through domestic labor finds its apotheosis here; Delver's formal restraint in letting the fire and hands speak before the voice-over positions this firmly in the lineage of structuralist cinema and Indigenous refusal of easy representation.
That decision to let the bannock cook in real time—refusing the quick-cut montage or ASMR reduction—makes the temporal and sensory knowledge Indigenous to the act itself, and suddenly the film isn't about bannock, it's *made* the same way bannock is made.