I met Bistyek in Winnipeg, already knowing two things about him: that he was an artist and that he was Kurdish. I introduced myself in Kurmanji, expecting that we would immediately find common ground. We did, but only to a point. Although we belonged to the same people and spoke the same dialect, our everyday language had been shaped by the different countries we grew up in. He was born in Syria; I was born in Turkey. Decades of living under different political and linguistic realities had left their mark on our Kurdish. In a strange way, our mother tongue had become almost a second language to both of us. We found ourselves searching for words, borrowing from Arabic, Turkish, and English, until, before long, we had slipped almost entirely into English—on a cold Winnipeg day, far from the mountains of Kurdistan, in the endless flatness of the Canadian prairies. One thing that endless flatness teaches you is how to bear the flood of memories. There are no mountains to hold them back. You have to find somewhere to channel the weight of the past and the future onto a surface: sometimes a painting, sometimes a piece of wood, sometimes music. The past and the future arrive in brief, concentrated moments, melt into the present, and stretch it out, heavy and seemingly endless. Bistyek embraced this city, and the city embraced him.

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.”