Pidikwe

With great formal simplicity, this visually sublime work by multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet unfolds with a steadily building intensity that is both mesmerizing and galvanizing. Without dialogue, carried by an immersive soundscape, it gives full space to bodies, gestures, and light, asserting movement as a primary language. Emerging from the darkness, six Indigenous women from different generations become incandescent presences, revealed through warm colors and ever-shifting lighting, like planets within the same orbital system, bound by a shared force.

Dance—both traditional and contemporary—functions here as a space of living memory, transmission, and healing. By revisiting powwow steps, Monnet affirms the Indigenous body as a site of resistance, reclamation, and projection toward the future. The costumes and accessories, designed by the artist, converse with jewelry and cultural symbols to situate these female figures within a temporal continuum, between ancestral heritage and a future yet to be imagined.

At the intersection of cinema, performance, and visual art, the work deliberately blurs categories to offer a sensory experience that articulates a vision: that of a prosperous, radiant Indigenous future, freed from colonial gazes. A true celebration, the film highlights the power, beauty, and self-determination of Indigenous women whose bodies become at once archives, manifestos, and promises.

Ariane Roy-Poirier
General Manager and Artistic Director
Plein(s) Écran(s)