Kevin Lee Burton
Nikamowin (Song) | 2007 | 11:15mins | BetaSP | Canada
Kevin Lee Burton is a director, film festival programmer, off-line editor and freelance camera operator. He is Swampy Cree from God’s Lake Narrows, Manitoba. In his directorial works he has designed a niche by specifically working in his ancestral tongue, Cree. Kevin was awarded Best Experimental Video and Best Indigenous Language Production for his experimental film Nikamowin (Song) at the 2007 ImagineNATIVE Film Festival.
Burton has worked for the Native and Indigenous Initiatives at the Sundance Institute / Film Festival, programmed for IMAGeNATION and Out on Screen film festivals, and has co-developed and written for Nehiyawetan, a children’s Cree language series.
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Nikamowin (Song) is a linguistic soundscape comprised of the deconstruction and reconstruction of Cree narration dances with various manipulated landscapes. This audio-visual experiment explores how languages exist, emerge, and survive. It is obvious that the altered and constructed Cree that the director ‘speaks’ in the film is not one that conforms to the traditional constructs of the Cree language, but it does resonate deeply enough to make us feel like we are hearing something that we truly understand – a message that begs lost language speakers to hear their inner song of pride so they can bring back the language that lives alone, waiting in the darks of their spirits.
Featured in: The Pit of Babel: A Speculative Archive
