Supported by the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund

In collaboration with producing partner Leah Clare Michaels.

A young Ojibwe writer, under pressure to complete his first novel, becomes the lens for a broader story: how Indigenous culture survives in an era where tradition and technology collide, and where authentic voices compete with distorted media portrayals.

This hybrid documentary film follows Shaawan, a young Ojibwe writer at the threshold of artistic breakthrough. Recently awarded the Rubys Artist Grant and newly signed with a literary agent, Shaawan embodies both the promise of an emerging voice and the heavy pressure of expectation. Every page of his unfinished manuscript carries the tension of opportunity and risk: will he be able to finish a novel that reflects his truth without buckling under expectation?

Set in the present day across the landscapes of Ojibwe life—family, community, and the solitary rhythms of writing—the film begins in an observational mode. With quiet intimacy, it portrays Shaawan’s daily negotiations between creative work and cultural responsibility. His story becomes a lens through which we witness the continuity of Ojibwe culture, and the fragility of its survival after centuries of erasure and distortion.

But this is not a story told only in the present tense. Interwoven into the documentary fabric are images of how Native identity has been historically depicted: outdated textbooks, Western films, early cartoons, and modern social media feeds. One moment a black-and-white Western plays on an old television, cowboys and “Indians” frozen in caricature; the next, Shaawan himself sits in that frame—modern, quiet, creative—embodying everything absent from those stereotypes. These juxtapositions invite the audience to ask: what matters more, the lived culture, or the culture refracted back through media?

The film further pushes form through supplemental animation. Early sequences use handmade stop-motion puppets, evoking tactile traditions of storytelling—each frame imperfect, crafted, alive. As the narrative progresses, this aesthetic gradually shifts toward digital gloss and hyper-slick motion graphics, mirroring the encroaching influence of technology in both Shaawan’s life and in cultural representation more broadly.

Midway, the documentary itself fractures into hybrid storytelling. Shaawan is “pulled” into a surreal narrative passage, trapped inside a social media feed of kaleidoscopic digital imagery. Here, form reflects feeling: the anxiety of external voices, the claustrophobia of expectation, the struggle to preserve authorship against algorithmic noise. This experiment is not a departure from truth, but an embodiment of it—the lived pressure of an Indigenous artist in today’s media landscape.

The story eventually returns to sincerity. Shaawan reappears at his desk, still wrestling with words, still holding the possibility of a novel that resists both erasure and distortion. His journey does not resolve with triumph, but with endurance: the recognition that storytelling itself is an act of cultural survival.

Contributors to this narrative include a lineage of Native mentors and voices. Shaawan’s aunt, Pulitzer-winning novelist Louise Erdrich, offers a living legacy of literary resistance. Lily Gladstone appears as a personal mentor and symbolic bridge between Indigenous authenticity and mainstream visibility. Elders, peers, and cultural workers lend context, showing that Shaawan’s work is not solitary but part of a larger web of survival and resilience.

By blending documentary sincerity with hybrid experimentation, this film transcends biography. It is a meditation on cultural survival, the power of story as resistance, and the fragile, urgent task of writing Indigenous futures into being.