Official Selection, 2025 Toronto International Film Festival
“Naponse’s ability to build such tangible intimacy makes Aki a film to behold, feel, and hear—the latter largely due to Juno Award–nominated cellist Cris Derkson’s tremendous score.” – POV Magazine
Aki (Anishinaabemowin for “earth” or “land”) is a meditative, visually immersive documentary set in Atikameksheng Anishnawbek in Northern Ontario, Canada. Filmed over seasonal years, this unscripted project unfolds entirely without narration or dialogue, instead relying on the aural textures of wind, water, animal and human life, and ceremony to tell the story of a people fully rooted in their land.
Director Darlene Naponse, a community member and artist from Atikameksheng, invites us into her homeland and shares an intimate glimpse into the layers of everyday life where storytelling emerges through gestures, places, and the non-verbal. Aki shares land-based practices such as fishing, maple syrup harvesting, and medicine gathering, while reflecting on histories of colonisation, environmental exploitation, and attempted cultural erasure against the realities of the ongoing strength of community. It is a film about memory without nostalgia, resistance without spectacle, and language beyond words, enhanced by a stunning score by Juno award-winning Cree cellist Cris Derksen.
Following the tradition of globally acclaimed visual documentaries like Ron Fricke’s Baraka, Godfrey Reggio’s The Qatsi Trilogy, and Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s Honeyland – and fully subverting ethnographic filmmaking – Aki eschews conventional exposition in favour of a deeply embodied cinematic language. But while those films traverse the globe, Aki remains rooted in a specific, sovereign place: the lands, waters, and people of Atikameksheng.
