There are filmmakers whose development we follow with keen interest. Micmac director Jeff Barnaby, author of the films Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Rhymes for ghosts) and Blood Quantum (Red quantum), was one of them. In view of this last feature film, which renewed the zombie film by infusing it with a sensitivity and a symbolism dependent on the cultural heritage of the filmmaker, we were impatiently waiting for the next one. However, we learned this Thursday, Jeff Barnaby died of cancer at the age of 46, leaving behind a work that was certainly too short, but important nonetheless.
Born in 1976 in the Micmac community of Listuguj, in the Gespe’gewa’gi district, in Gaspésie, Jeff Barnaby developed a passion for horror and science fiction films very early on. David Cronenberg’s early films, especially Rabid (Rage), about a young woman who becomes a carrier of a zombifying virus after having received an experimental transplant, particularly marked him. Moreover, one will detect later in the cinema of Jeff Barnaby, the influence of the “ body horror », or body horror, developed by the Canadian master.
Another film that made a strong impression on him was Leolo, by Jean-Claude Lauzon, about a child from an eccentric home who escapes into a teeming inner world. His taste for magical realism came from there.
In order to study cinema, he moved to Montreal and attended Dawson College, then Concordia University. His first short films all echoed the territory of his childhood. His first, From Cherry English (2004), was selected at the Sundance Festival, and his second, The Colony (2007), at TIFF, where it won an award. followed File Under Miscellaneous (2010) and Etlinisigu’niet (Bleed Down ; 2015), the latter produced by the NFB.
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It was in 2013 that he went to feature, with the as powerful as poetic Rhymes for Young Ghouls, the story of a teenager who takes revenge on the official in charge of the local boarding school. In the Los Angeles Times, “an impressive start” was reported. Same story in The dutywhere colleague Odile Tremblay wrote during the Quebec release in 2014:
“Awarded in Tribeca and Vancouver, after much praise collected on the road to the festivals, Rhymes for Young Ghoulswhich happily interweaves thriller, initiatory quest, fantasy and dark social portrait of a drifting community, is a powerful and poetic Native American film, as we had hoped to see for a long time. […] Jeff Barnaby, Micmac (Mi’kmaq, as it is written in the native language) from Gaspésie, had shown his strike force and his sharp eye as a filmmaker in his short films The Colony and File Under Miscellaneous. With this first foray into feature films, who can still ignore his talent? Also a musician and poet, his artistic touch is everywhere, creating a stylistic unity that permeates his powerful vision of Aboriginal reservations. »
Then came 2020 Blood Quantum, in which an indigenous community seems mysteriously immune to a zombie pandemic. At the time, Jeff Barnaby, who not only wrote and directed but also edited all of his films, told me:
“I had several goals: to make something that would be a love letter to zombie movies, to satisfy fans of the genre — of which I am — with mass gore, and to do that while expressing values and concerns that are dear to me. »
With this film, Jeff Barnaby succeeded in this case in realizing an old dream, the desire to make a zombie film tormenting him since adolescence. Only here, wishing to offer something new, he did not really know from which angle to approach the genre. It was while discussing with his friend and producer John Christou that the concept took hold, as he explained in the same interview:
“We were talking and all of a sudden I heard myself say, ‘What if Indigenous people were immune?’ Eureka! The implications of this concept then tumbled out, starting with this opportunity to tell the story of colonialism in Canada in allegorical form. I also wanted to address this dissonance that opposes us unnecessarily; this binary vision that we too often have of things and people. For example, I’m Mi’gmaq, you’re not, but you love zombie movies like me, and we talk about it, and from this common point many other similarities can emerge. There is that in the film, that I wanted both fun and relevant, but above all not vindictive, politically correct, or moralizing. »
The result was a film imbued with “strangeness”, “poetic, and haunting”. Blood Quantum received ten Canadian Screen Award nominations.
Jeff Barnaby was married to Navajo filmmaker Sarah Del Seronde, with whom he had a son. Before his death he wrote:
“Your language, your land and your elders are as much time markers as cultural milestones. As a native, you exist to move your culture from the past to the present to ensure its survival in the future. »
Through his cinema, Jeff Barnaby will have contributed to this cultural continuity. atiu.