Tshitashun (Number)
2009 · 3m · Canada
Directed by James Picard
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
In the Innu community of Betsiamites, residents use French rather than Innu when speaking numbers, and this short made with Wapikoni Mobile explores why that habit took hold.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would yawn at a three-minute essay about *numbers*, but Picard's got the audacity to make a cultural contradiction—French digits in an Innu mouth—feel like a small act of resistance, and that's exactly the kind of premise that gets boring people unstuck.
Tshitashun sits precisely in the essay-film tradition, using constraint and specificity to examine how language colonization persists in the intimate, everyday space of counting—a formal rigor that echoes the best of Agnès Varda's attention to vernacular culture.
The decision to foreground the *sound* of code-switching—letting speakers repeat numbers in both languages and feel the weight of that switch—is what elevates this from anthropological note-taking into something that lands in the chest.