Seawolf: Short Film Review
In big cities such as Los Angeles and New York City, it is easy to overlook the importance of land beyond the fact that there doesn’t seem to be enough of it. Locked in tiny apartments, commuting instinctively to and from work, maybe going out for the occasional coffee, we often forget that we inhabit a once-natural space that existed before the construction of our concrete jungles. Even more often, we forget that this space was seized from indigenous communities. Alexander Sworik’s short documentary Seawolf addresses this issue, following Mike Willie and K’odi Nelson, two men from the Musga’makw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation in British Columbia.
The documentary consists of two brief interviews with Willie and Nelson, intercut with footage of different locations within the beautiful Great Bear Rainforest. Both Willie and Nelson speak directly to the effects of Native American reservations, as well as the significance of the land, on their cultural identity, and highlight the responsibility they feel in maintaining that cultural identity through the next generations.
Alongside their intense words, the tone of the entire piece is somber and serious, enhanced by the grim color palette placed on nearly every shot. From the very beginning, we are submerged into a landscape of deep blues and wide shadows as we move across the Kingcome River. These hues carry throughout the film, conveying the severity of Willie and Nelson’s message while also showcasing the natural beauty of the river and the surrounding environment. Combined with the blue tint and shades, the entire atmosphere – the river, surrounding forest and distant mountains – has a fresh, damp feeling to it, both sublime and solemn. The only exceptions to this color scale are the shots of Willie, Nelson, and Nelson’s son performing a dance, which seem to burst with color. The vibrant reds and bright blues of their traditional garments burst through on screen, juxtaposing the rest of the film as if to say that it is their culture that truly brings the landscape to life.
Much like the coloring, the sound design of the film compels a mixture of wonder and severity in its audience. It begins with a soft piano, carefully delivering one note at a time. It is later joined by a violin, and then a flute, as the world opens up and we see the full river and mountains in the background. As Nelson comments on the purpose of the reservations as being a means of erasing both a history and cultural identity, we are introduced to composer Ryan Taubert’s song “Memories,” which expands slowly and deliberately throughout the rest of the film, reaching peaks at moments such as the dance before ebbing only to grow again.
When the film depicts photographs taken during the period of time in which “residential schools” were enforced in indigenous communities, the sound of a single shutter echoes as if located in a desolate room. This heightens the utter loneliness running under the surface of the film, the feeling of an entire community’s estrangement from the world into reservations and boarding schools.
The film ends with a poignant question raised by Willie: “what do we want the future of our history to be?” We see one last shot of the river, along with title cards describing the ways in which Willie and Nelson continue to contribute to the conservation of their land and culture: Willie uses the tours of Seawolf Adventures to educate visitors on the ecology and history of the Great Bear Rainforest, while Nelson works on the Nawalakw Culture Project as a means of creating a space for healing among the indigenous community of British Columbia. The history of reservations and boarding schools, in Canada as much as the U.S., is one that too often goes unnoticed and unexamined. Yet, the efforts of Willie and Nelson, as well as documentaries such as this, show hope for combatting this social ignorance and moving towards a future history we want to see.