Aki
Aki is like a prayer ... beautiful, personal, and uncomfortable all at once.
Live from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
Aki is a film of abundance. The world it envisions and celebrates is lifegiving and beautiful. Most of Aki, a title that translates from Anishinaabemowin (also known as Ojibwe) as “earth or land,” is spent in extreme close-ups of the flowing (or frozen or thawing) river, flowers and the bugs crawling on them, and the several sports played by the community’s youth. The cinematography is rich in capturing the fullness of the land; even the cold Northern Ontario winter is still beautiful. And this is enough. Dialogue and characters or plot would be extraneous. All Darlene Naponse, perhaps the most well-known Anishinaabe filmmaker, needs for her documentary is this beautiful community, the land they live on, and her camera.
That’s not all Aki is, though. As it passes from season to season and from one beauty to another, Naponse reminds us of the havoc that (colonial) industrial anthropocentrism has sown onto our lands. Not unlike the urbanized pillow shots of Yasujirō Ozu’s films, Naponse and her very small crew insert periodic reminders of the giant factories and mines not far away. Unlike Ozu, these shots don’t impart a warm feeling like dew in the morning, but instead remind one of a certain kind of modernity’s disruption (a modernity that, in practice, was enacted only through colonization and occupation).
The enormous metal structures intrude from the same ground like disruptive aliens, and she always shoots them from afar — as if they were some kind of unsatiated monster devouring all that comes before them. The deer scat is more worthy of a close-up than these industrial wastelands. One memorable shot shows a handful of birds, maybe ravens, dancing in the wind before a giant metal silo of some sort. The birds disappear behind the building as they move from one side to the other in their air-dance, and every time they disappear from view, a small part of the viewer — or at least this viewer — doubts they will reappear.
Continue reading at In Review Online.