Perhaps unsurprisingly, film is immensely personal for Barnaby, who explains that he is fascinated by obsessive people who exhibit strong artistic visions, such as Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola. ![]() “You see that play out a little bit in the film it’s a love letter to the movies I grew up watching, but at the same time, you can see me wrestling with my history as a foster kid.” From from age 4, he grew up in foster care, and as a result sometimes has trouble understanding family dynamics. There is so much, in fact, that the director points out at one stage that he has glossed over something crucial. More than once during the call, Barnaby emphasizes how there is “a lot to unpack” with the film and the ideas that fueled it. “A lot of what I try to do is integrate Hollywood cinematic tropes that come out of horror, and almost use that as the proverbial white guide through native country.” “I always knew that film could act as a spotlight on social issues, but for me it was integrating all the artwork that I was growing up on and applying it to a fictional world,” says Barnaby. His stepmom was a Miq’maq language teacher, so his love for incorporating Miq’maq into his stories came from her. Having grown up in a low-income family, Barnaby recalls “losing” himself in artwork, poetry, painting, books and movies. “To a certain extent, taking all the non-natives that survived the zombie apocalypse, hoarding them all in one place and telling them they can’t leave without permission, or face death, is in and of itself a critique on the whole reservation system and the idea that we as a culture in the 21st century needed to subject these people in order to get where we were going.”Īmong his inspirations, Barnaby drew upon the work of documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin ( Incident at Restigouche) - one of the first prominent indigenous filmmakers in Canada - and the horror novels of Clive Barker and Stephen King. “For me, really what I wanted to do was speak to the idea that reservations were essentially the first concentration camps,” explains Barnaby. That dystopian feel and look of the film comes, in part, from medieval imagery and concentration camps. “The zombies are metaphors for racism, consumerism, capitalism and colonialism, and all the ‘isms’ that came before,” the director says, adding that they also serve as a criticism of the dystopia of today’s landscape. ![]() The film is set in 1981 - a year significant to the director as it was when his reserve was raided by the Quebec Provincial Police and Department of Fisheries - and alludes to the ongoing conflict between native and non-native people. It stars Michael Greyeyes, Forrest Goodluck, Kiowa Gordon and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and hails from production company Prospector Films.īarnaby says that he simply took characters that he grew up around and placed them in a familiar Western story. The film, depicting indigenous inhabitants on the Mi’qmaq reserve who are immune to a sweeping zombie plague, premiered in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019. This conversation coincided with the release of Barnaby’s second feature, Blood Quantum, on Shudder, a streaming service dedicated to horror, thriller and supernatural titles. But it's a list of art that, whether super popular from the moment it was released or that gained traction over time, does a worthy job of depicting the experience of living with depression.'Avatar 3' Pushed a Year to 2025, Two 'Star Wars' Movies Head for 2026 and 'Avengers' Films Delayed In the same way that no one ever goes through their whole life feeling only happiness, even our favorite funny actors can find themselves in darker places. Some movies make conversations about depression more approachable by casting lead actors typically associated with comedy, like Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction. Since film is a vessel for an artist's vision, many filmmakers channel their own experiences with depression into the movies that they make. Movies help us identify with characters managing depression and scenarios that better outline what it's like to live with mental illness. One way we can engage with that idea is through film. There's still work to do, but awareness of those figures, and deeper reflection upon depression's role in everyday life, can go a long way in helping to defeat the stigma that surrounds mental illness. ![]() Official estimates say that 16.2 million adults-or, nearly 7% of the United States adult population-have had a depressive episode in any given year.
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