"I wanted to make something that I would've loved to see when I was younger," notes actress, writer and director Kaniehtiio Horn when reflecting on her directorial debut feature Seeds.
An award-winning Mohawk actor known for her memorable performances in Letterkenny, Reservation Dogs, Hemlock Grove and more, she originally conceived the film to be a vehicle that would drive her acting career in a new direction. "I just wanted to feel like I had some control over the trajectory of my career, which I didn't feel like I had for the last 20 years," Horn tells Exclaim! over Zoom.
Encouraged by friends to sit in the director's saddle herself, the idea of taking the reins is felt on both sides of the camera. The protagonist of Seeds, which had its world premiere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, is a struggling Indigenous influencer named Ziggy (played by Horn) who wants nothing more than to put her bicycle delivery days behind her. Shortly after securing a lucrative brand deal with an agricultural company called Nature's Oath, the aspiring social media maven is summoned back home to her reservation to house sit for her aunt.
Coming from a long line of farmers, Ziggy is tasked with protecting her family's seeds. Forced to deal with "shitty rez Wi-Fi" that only gets a signal in one spot, Ziggy tries to make the best of a less than desirable situation. Alone in the home with only her cat Potato to keep her company, she soon finds herself in a fight for her life when a mysterious figure arrives determined to get his hands on her family's prized possession.
Using the blueprint of home invasion films to construct the framework, Seeds gleefully blends comedy and horror to form the bricks that house its thrilling narrative. Horn is no stranger to the genre world through her acting career, and so it made sense for Horn's first feature to follow suit. "It felt like a safe, fun space for me to cut my teeth," Horn acknowledges. "[The] genre allows you to bring comedy, thriller, a message and all this stuff all wrapped up into one thing."
Citing Home Alone as a major influence, Horn did not want to play into the traditional tropes of the villain seeking money or Ziggy herself. As the director notes, "I [was thinking] what is the most precious thing to Indigenous people? It's our connection to the land, and for my people, [it's] the connection to the three sisters, which are the corn, bean and squash seeds."
While the filmmaker had no intentions of making a "message" movie by any means, the theme of rage, especially ancestral rage, grew organically when working with editor Lindsay Allikas. "I knew I wanted to get to the point where [Ziggy] fucking rages out. But I didn't realize that it was because I have a lot of rage in me," confesses Horn.
As a person who has experienced trauma (Horn and her family were involved in the 1990 Oka Crisis), she points to motherhood, therapy and the act of creating things like Seeds as ways to analyze and better process the anger within. However, she is quick to note that Indigenous rage is something that people do not acknowledge enough.
"I'm fucking angry, and I have every right to be," she continues. "As a woman, too, not just an Indigenous woman, but just as a plain old woman, I have rage. Especially [with] what's going on politically right now in the States, [which] could creep up here. It's scary and it's enraging."
To physically capture this sense of festering rage bubbling beneath the surface of Ziggy, Horn used her ancestor's wartime treatment of the Jesuits as inspiration for her protagonist's own acts of righteous vengeance. The filmmaker acknowledges the brutality of that era while also understanding the history that would push her people to such a violent retribution.
"This is brutal, but if you're seeing your whole village be wiped out, all of your crops being burned, all of your people being raped — you're just losing things as every minute ticks by — why would you not be angry?" she states.
The notion of being pushed to the brink also helps the viewer understand Ziggy's evolution over the course of the film from influencer to badass heroine. Desperate people do desperate things, but Horn admits to being a little concerned about how audiences would perceive the cash-strapped Ziggy after unknowingly signing a deal with the corporate devil. "I was like, 'Oh my God, she's a fucking sellout,'" Horn says. "But as soon as she was given the facts, she was like, 'Alright, fuck that. I'm dropping this.'"
Unlike her central character, though, Horn's authenticity is never in question. With Seeds, she more than shows that she's capable of crafting engaging works in front of and behind the camera.
When asked what she was most proud of when it came to making her first feature, she humbly points to the support from her family and the collaboration from talented people she was surrounded by: "I'm proud of myself, but I also know that I wouldn't have been able to do it without all of the help that I had."