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Jeff Barnaby is a Mi’gMaq Canadian director, writer, composer and film editor. His work is often seen as a bare knuckled approach to the harsh colonial realities faced by Indigenous people in the world today. He is best know for his 2013 debut film Rhymes for Young Ghouls, which premiered at TIFF 2013 and won the Tribeca 2012 Creative Promise Award for Narrative.

Early Life

Jeff Barnaby grew up in Quebec on the Listuguj Reserve. As a child, Barnaby was frequently in and out of foster care, yet he credits much of his strength to the Indigenous women he was surrounded by growing up. He graduated from Concordia University with a degree in film production in 2004.

Career

The short film, From Cherry English, was the first of Barnaby's projects that had the full support of a crew and production team on a professional level. In Barnaby's film, the protagonist, Traylor, a young urban Indigenous man, is confronted with the loss of native identity after he meets a girl in a club and decides to take her home. Language is an essential component of the film as Traylor's disconnect with his own native tongue is one that his lover exposes ruthlessly. Barnaby himself is responsible for composing and performing the musical soundtrack in addition to writing and directing the film.

From Cherry English, has won 2 Golden Sheaf awards and played in Tribecca, Sundance, Fantasia, Atlantic International Film Fest, and the Vancouver International Film Fest.

The Colony, Jeff Barnaby’s second short was set to be a gritty depiction of decay and desolation. In the film, Maytag, a Mi'gMaq man displaced from his own reservation, subsequently latches on to the only other Indian within the city. After she is snatched away by his friend, a drug dealer, the lovesick and drug addled Maytag turns sadistic as he launches an attack on the cockroaches that he believes have colonized his trailer and helped steal his fiancé. Defeated and heart broken, Maytag turns to his chainsaw for solace. Imaginative and proficiently executed, Barnaby's powerful film serves as a twisted allegory on miscegenation, drawing attention to the struggles of the modern native and their relationship with self-destruction.

Barnaby's 2010 short film File Under Miscellaneous was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Live Action Short Drama.

In, File Under Miscellaneous, motifs such as self-loathing and the question of language, which have been central in Barnaby's other works, come together. The seven-minute futuristic film references a number of classic science fiction films and books, as it follows an Indigenous man going to a clinic that performs skin-changes. Afterward the procedure, he enters, with his new white man’s skin, into a room filled with others like him and they all listen to a man talking in German on a big screen, in what is meant to be a reference to the Aryan ideal associated with Nazism. Mi’gmaq actor, Glen Gould, who also starred as Maytag in The Colony, stars as the unnamed protagonist. In this film, he submits to the gruesomely depicted process of having his tattooed skin removed in sections for the purpose of resembling a white man.

Barnaby made his feature film debut with Rhymes for Young Ghouls. The visionary feature uses the horrific legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools as the basis for an all out revenge-fantasy thriller. Alia, a young Indigenous woman who is haunted by her mother after she commits suicide, sells weed on the Mi’kmaq reservation in order to bribe the sociopathic Indian agent to stay out of the local reservation school. However, after a particular deal goes south, Alia must fight for her freedom. A fierce and gripping feature debut, one dripping an atmosphere of post-apocalyptic dread and instability, Barnaby's film waists no time on picturesque notions of feel-good empowerment. Barnaby brings all aspects of the fim together with a mixed soundtrack of Mississippi hill-country blues and his own score which he recorded over the course of four days while fighting the flu.

Rhymes for Young Ghouls won the Tribeca 2012 Creative Promise Award for Narrative and was produced in association with the Canadian Film Centre. It premiered at TIFF in 2013.

On August 3, 2014 Jeff Barnaby won the inaugural APTN Award at the year's First People's Festival in Montreal during a special awards ceremony that was held at the McCord Museum. Barnaby was among the three finalists chosen for the first ever APTN Award to be presented at Présence Autochtone. The APTN Award was designed to celebrate the extraordinary work of an Indigenous filmmaker who distinguished themselves over the past year.

In 2015 Barnaby was invited by the National Film Board of Canada to participate in Souvenir, a collective made up of 4 First Nations filmmakers invited to use their archival material in order to create a short documentary. Barnaby's contribution was the short film Etlinisigu’niet (Bleed Down). Featuring music by Tanya Tagaq, Barnaby’s film worked to destroy any remaining mythology that Canada is a fair and just country. His message at the heart of the film is that the long history of attempts at getting rid of the Indian problem have failed. His work, as well as the other four films in the collection, address Indigenous representation, while reframing the history of Canadian through a contemporary lens.

Filmography

From Cherry English (2003)

MC Mario vs. Barrucco: Black Out (2003)

The Colony (2007)

File Under Miscellaneous (2010)

Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013)

Etlinisigu'niet/Bleed Down (2015)

Composer

The Colony (2007)

File Under Miscellaneous (2010)

Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013)