Brébeuf

Overview

Brébeuf is a study of St. Ignace II, in Huronia, where the ethnographers and Jesuit missionaries, later saints, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, were killed in 1649. The images in this film arise from a reading of that story - the joining of the sumac and the cross, the blessing gestures, struggles in the field, elliptical scans of stones, and the shimmering of water to summon a glimpse of the flesh boiled from the skin, in fables of the killing. Brébeuf draws from the dark and storied history of early Western conquest, rediscovering in the harsh, untamed landscape of the North resonances of the violent conflicts between the Jesuits, the Huron, and the Iroquois.