George A. Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead spearheaded an entire genre that has spawned hundreds of films and TV shows centred around flesh-eating monsters. Before their cinematic deviation, the origins of the reanimated dead can be traced back to 17th-century colonial Caribbean sugarcane fields and are connected to Vodou, a religion in which enslaved West Africans held the belief that death would free them to return to their homeland for their afterlife. If a landowner turned them into a zombie, however, their homeward passage would be interrupted and they would labour in plantations forevermore. Director Maya Annik Bedward explores the damaging ongoing appropriation of the undead figure in popular culture to unpack the mythology and reclaim the zombie’s power as a symbol of survival and resilience. Extensive visual research and interviews with filmmakers, vodou practitioners and anthropologists juxtapose horror-film history with Haitian culture to create a pathway to understand the roots of the zombie in slavery and the spiritual significance of a lost body deprived of its soul. Alexander Rogalski, Hot Docs
In English, French and Haitian, with English subtitles.
Join director Maya Annik Bedward for a post-screening Q&A this Friday, October 23. Moderated by Daphnée Nostrome.
About Daphnée Nostrome
Daphnée is a systems change leader and Toronto-based artist of Haitian descent whose work centres on cultural revival. Art is her love language, one she has been refining for more than four decades. She could draw before she could string a sentence together, and today she paints, draws, sings and writes to celebrate African spiritual practices and challenge distorted narratives about people of African descent.
Her work explores decolonization and collective healing, and has appeared in York University's New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis and in Look for Me in the Whirlwind, a book about Marcus Garvey. Daphnée has illustrated works for Greenpeace, had solo and group shows at Toronto galleries and exhibited at human rights shows, including events hosted by War Child and the Ontario Human Rights Commission. She also served as a cultural consultant on Maya Bedward's documentary, Black Zombie.
Community-building is an integral part of Daphnée's practice. She has mentored emerging artists at the NIA Centre for the Arts. And as a member of the Ubuntu Community Collective, Daphnée led arts programming that supported Afro-diasporic single moms through the COVID-19 pandemic.
TICKETS (+HST)
General: $15
Members: $10, $8, FREE