BLOOD QUANTUM
The hook is intriguingly straightforward: in Blood Quantum, an infectious zombie disease spreads through the world, save for the residents of a Mi’kmaq community along the Québec-New Brunswick border who appear to be immune to the undeadly virus. In the post-apocalyptic remnants of their town, Sheriff Traylor (Michael Greyeyes) and his deputies guard the boundaries of their land against the violent hordes of “Zeds.” Traylor is joined by his estranged ex Joss (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), their teenage son Joseph (Forrest Goodluck), and Traylor’s troubled eldest son, Lysol (Kiowa Gordon).
It’s an effective setup that director Jeff Barnaby uses to work through generational trauma, both personal and collective: the (1984). Barnaby has often cited Obomsawin’s account of the Restigouche raids as a key influence, borrowing images and ideas from this and other documentaries in her body of work for . The film’s opening scene, which hints at the zombie troubles to come with the reanimation of gutted fish, neatly mirrors the salmon-spawning footage that opens in their complementary cycles of birth/death. Barnaby later invokes a famous image from Obomsawin’s 1993 film of an armed Canadian soldier being stared down by a Mohawk man during the 1990 Oka Crisis. Even the interprovincial bridge connecting New Brunswick and Québec, central to the conflict at Restigouche, gets a Grand Guignol-worthy set-piece involving a strategically placed woodchipper.
