Nikamowin (Song) is a Canadian short documentary film, directed by Kevin Lee Burton and released in 2007.
[1] A meditation on the importance of language in defining personal identity, the film opens with a brief English language conversation in which one man asks another one why he cannot speak Cree, before transitioning into Cree language dialogue sampled and looped back to create a beatboxing track; it is visually accompanied by footage from both Vancouver and Burton's hometown of Gods Lake Narrows, similarly looped back and edited to suggest repeated back and forth travel between the urban and rural worlds.
[2] The film premiered at the 2007 imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, where it won the award for Best Indigenous Language Production and the Kent Monkman Award for Best Experimental/Innovation in Storytelling.
[4] It was later included in various exhibitions of indigenous North American art, including Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in 2012,[5] and the touring Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture in 2013.
This article related to a Canadian film of the 2000s is a stub.