NECTARINE

2023

[TRT – 9:00]

In Nectarine, Kirouac weaves together two separate recollections of the same childhood flashback as told to her (and the viewer) by her adoptive mother, recorded twenty years apart. As her mind travels back to growing up in rural New Brunswick alongside a Mi’kmaq reserve in the 1930’s, her aged hands peel apples in both sequences. At times memory is met with forgetfulness, details repeated word for word with a span of twenty years between them, while other parts are riddled with contradiction. As the elderly woman continues to peel the apples naked, she willingly exposes genuine thoughts on the past sharing of the land and sea while fragments of history, beliefs, values, facts and fiction fall into her baking bowl. Nectarine serves up a tense and humorous narrative about cohabitation, survival, sustenance, and generational perceptions. Kirouac uses this intimate exchange as a bridge between her adopted mother and  her own estranged Metis identity while asking the viewer to ponder, who is the apple and who is the nectarine.