The director’s representatives say he died after a year-long battle with cancer. He was 46. Raised on the Listuguj Reserve in Quebec, Barnaby directed several short films, including the Jutra Award-nominated The Colony and the Genie-nominated File Under Miscellaneous. The Montreal-based writer-director won acclaim for his 2013 debut Rhymes for Young Ghouls. The film criticized Canada’s residential school system in a way that had not been widely done in cinema. Set in the 1970s, it also reminded audiences that the events it depicted were not ancient history. Barnaby followed up Ghouls with the 2019 zombie horror film Blood Quantum, which swept the Canadian Screen Awards, winning six of its 10 nominations – the most of any film at that year’s awards. It featured an almost entirely indigenous cast and took Barnaby more than 13 years to complete. From left, Forrest Goodluck, Michael Greyeyes and Kiowa Gordon appear in a scene from Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum. (Elevation images) “In technical and political terms, it’s 100 percent an indigenous zombie exploitation film,” Barnaby said in a 2020 interview with the CBC. Blood Quantum depicted a zombie outbreak on a fictional Mi’kmaq reservation. Although it premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, its theatrical release was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was released on streaming in 2020. “People keep calling it a pushy movie with all the things happening now because of the virus,” Barnaby said of the film, which loosely paralleled the ongoing pandemic. “Meanwhile the natives put up with it forever.”
Friends share sorrow, praise
Friends and contemporaries shared their grief soon after news of his death broke. “Beautifully stubborn” to the end, Jeff Barnaby was bold in his life and work. He brought a sensitivity, poignancy and depth to himself that translated through his films and resonated with Indigenous and non-Native audiences,” friend and actor Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs was quoted as saying in a media release. Jacobs – who currently stars in the Taika Waititi-created series Reservation Dogs and will appear in the upcoming Marvel series Echo – starred in Rhymes for Young Ghouls. In the release, he went on to say that he “wouldn’t be an actor today” without the influence of Barnaby, whose films “resonated with Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences”. “Canadian cinema was better for having his talent, passion and vision,” actor and writer Jay Baruchel said in a tweet. Fellow Canadian writer-director Jason Eisener shared that Barnaby “was incredibly talented with a powerful and inspiring voice.” Barnaby is survived by his wife, Sarah Del Cerrone, and son, Miles.
