Métis beadwork might conjure images of moccasins, coats and mittens, but this animator has adapted the art form into stop motion film.
Maxime Kornachuk is a Métis animator based in Winnipeg who focuses on stop motion and rotoscope, where the animator traces over live footage frame by frame. His latest film, Where Our Flowers Grow, uses stop motion beadwork to explore Métis identity and is set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on Sept. 16.
“There’s something really exciting about it, kind of terrifying just a little bit because it’s something that is quite big, but I would definitely say that [I feel] excitement over fear now that the film is done,” the animator said.
The film follows three pairs of Métis people dear to Kornachuk – his grandmother and brother, his close friend Grace and her little brother and Michif speakers with hunters from St. Ambrose, who the filmmaker described as his heroes. They recount stories of grappling with Métis identity while looking white, navigating the bureaucracy of legally claiming Indigenous identity and the changing status of Michif.
Kornachuk noted their stories and even physical appearances are different, but they all share the same cultural roots.
“Métis people are a lot like flowers. Their petals may be different colors, and they may look different, but at the end of the day, their roots all connect them to the same thing,” he said.
“I wanted to demystify what it is to be Red River Métis specifically because I always find that that’s a bit of a question mark, and at the end of the day, this film is like what I wish I had when I discovered that I was Métis, and I really fought with what that identity was, internally.”
Where Our Flowers Grow is as communal as it is personal, with first-person narration in French by Kornachuk about his lived experience.
“I really didn’t understand what Métis meant for a long time,” he stated. “I heard it for the first time when I was young, and my mom told me we were Métis, but it took probably a decade for me to really understand what that meant.”
He also explained his family went into hiding for their own survival due to the political landscape in Manitoba in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“[Métis identity] just became a really important part of my life because I see it as making up for lost time, not just for myself, but also for what happened to my family,” he said.
“I want to honour those people by continuing to talk about my culture and to reaffirm that culture within myself. It is pretty central to what I do artistically.”
Kornachuk is one of the five filmmakers chosen to take part in REDEFINED, a project created by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and TIFF where filmmakers under 30 teamed up with NFB producers to create non-fiction short films that showcase what it means to be Canadian or Indigenous.
“Working with the NFB has always been a dream,” said Kornachuk, who holds a diploma in multimedia communications from the University of Saint Boniface.
“I grew up watching NFB films. My dad is a cameraman. He was actually involved. He was my A camera operator when we were recording the interviews, and my mom worked in the media for many years, and she still does.”
Part of the production took place in Montreal, but the NFB also sent equipment to Kornachuk’s house and set up an animation studio in his brother’s old room.
To make the animation, Kornachuk placed and moved glass beads on a plate using a dental hook. He then took a photo of the work and progressed to the next frame.
“[It is] really hard to conceptualize how small [the beads] are, but they’re about the size of a crumb,” he expressed. “They were very small and kind of unruly.”
He said the flowers took, on average, an hour to make and would only result in half a second of footage. His favourite took six to seven hours. However, the beadwork was laborious but rewarding.
“[In] the opening sequence of the film with the first initial tapestry, there is on average about 2,300 beads on screen in that one moment when the tapestry is fully formed,” he said.
“It definitely took a long time, but I think it worked out because I’m very happy watching it.”
All in all, the animator expressed there are many ways to be Métis, and the identity is multitudinous.
“There is not one way to be Métis. There’s not one way to be Indigenous, point-blank period,” he said. “I think we really have to decolonize the idea of identity […] We try to put Indigenous people into these boxes and fit them so that it can be better understood, but we were never meant to be put in a box in the first place.”
“We as individuals understand our identities, and that might not be the same as every other Métis person or every other Indigenous person, but that is still our identity.”
Where Our Flowers Grow will be free to stream along with other REDEFINED films on the NFB’s platforms on the evening of Sept. 16.
