I met Rhayne in the summer of 2020 in Winnipeg, shortly after I moved to Canada for my PhD. She was DJ’ing, already with a visible spark, already operating beyond recognizable structures. There was a sense, even then, that she was not simply participating in a scene but quietly rearranging the conditions of it. Our friendship grew slowly, largely through what we did not exchange: not turning proximity into possession, not forcing disclosure into currency. I’ve come to understand her films in much the same way. They refuse extraction. They withhold resolution. They linger, knowing that true confrontation and disclosure is impossible in the wake of large-scale catastrophes—genocides, cultural genocides, residential schools, ecological extinctions, and their afterlives. Rhayne Vermette is a Métis filmmaker, visual artist, and animator based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her practice spans experimental animation, short films, and feature-length works, often created through small, intimate, and deliberately non-industrial modes of production. Her films are deeply rooted in place, family, and Indigenous presence, while resisting the demands of legibility often imposed by settler and international film circuits. Rather than explaining catastrophe, Vermette treats it as an ongoing and quotidian condition. As she states plainly in our conversation: “We’ve been living inside of it.”