Walking is Medicine
2017 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Alanis Obomsawin
Genres: adventure, biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
Six young Cree men, the Nishiyuu walkers, trek 1,600 kilometres on foot in winter from Whapmagoostui, Quebec, to Ottawa, following ancestral travel traditions to meet other nations and mark a new beginning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Obomsawin does something almost too respectful here—the mythic framing is earned, sure, but I want her to crack the frame open, to show us the blisters and arguments and doubt underneath the ceremonial walk. It's the kind of film that consensus will love precisely because it doesn't risk anything.
A masterwork of restraint and visual testimony; Obomsawin positions this winter crossing within a lineage of Indigenous land knowledge and Nishiyuu determination, letting the landscape and the walkers' bodies do the narrative work rather than leaning on voiceover or sentiment. The film sits in genuine conversation with documentary tradition while refusing its extractive impulse.
The choice to hold on the walkers' faces in profile against the snow, letting wind and cold and effort read on their skin without cutting away, transforms a 1,600-kilometre journey into something utterly intimate—that single decision to *stay* with them rather than fragment the trek into montage is what makes it matter.