Michif filmmaker Wayne Wapeemukwa isn’t afraid to use visceral visuals and sound to question the world we’ve built, training his spotlight on those pushed to society’s margins.
His debut feature, Luk’Luk’I, followed five residents of Vancouver’s poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside during the 2010 Winter Olympics, with a screenplay the Canadian writer-director developed alongside his actors. The film won best Canadian feature at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017, and Wapeemukwa took home the Directors Guild of Canada’s DGC Discovery Award.
This week, he opens the international competition at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival with his sophomore feature, Manhunt — a mesmerizing, unsettling journey into social and psychological terrain that’s likely to shake viewers to the core.
Inspired by real-life murders in Canada in 2019, the film follows two young men on a road trip through the country’s northern frontier, fleeing their dead-end lives. Rather than reconstruct the facts behind the killing spree, Manhunt asks harder questions — about disconnection, alienation, modern masculinity, far-right and digital fantasies, and colonial echoes — to probe where such violence actually comes from.
