SGAAWAAY K’UUNA (EDGE OF THE KNIFE) Trailer | Canada’s Top Ten 2019

Arriving more than a century after British Columbia’s first-ever feature film, In the Land of the Head Hunters — Edward S. Curtis’ controversial but undeniably fascinating portrait of the Kwakwaka’wakw people of northern Vancouver Island — Edge of the Knife is the first feature to tell a story about the Kwakwaka’wakw’s neighbours the Haida. Part drama, part historical reclamation, First Nations filmmakers Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown’s film is set during the 19th century and performed entirely in the Haida language (a tongue so endangered, with less than 20 fluent speakers, that a dialect coach was needed). Whereas Curtis remained an outside observer, transfixed by the Kwakwaka’wakw’s masks and regalia, Edge of the Knife has a genuine Indigenous eye akin not only to other films by distributor Isuma (Zacharias Kunuk has an executive producer credit) but also from supernatural neorealist fables from African and Latin American filmmakers. Inspired by the Gaagiixiid/Gaagiid wildman of Haida mythology, the