INAATE/SE/ re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAATE/SE/ transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community within Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.
Direction
Khalil brothers smash documentary form like colonial borders.
Cinematography
Upper Peninsula becomes character, witness, and wound.
Editing
Temporal whiplash that mirrors prophecy itself.
Director
Zack Khalil
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Seven Fires Prophecy traditionally marks stages of Ojibwe migration; the Khalils literalize this as formal strategy, each 'fire' a different cinematic mode.
Shot in Sault Ste. Marie and the Brimley/Bay Mills area—locations rarely seen on screen, treated with the visual reverence usually reserved for Monument Valley westerns.
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