“Jacques Cartier's“chat sauvaige” would have been the red lynx.“Dyn”, the fallow deer,“Serf”, the wapiti or Canadian elk. Nowadays, the wapiti has completely disappeared from our regions.” On May 10th 1534, Jacques Cartier landed on Newfoundland. From then on he was much more interested in the fauna than in the Aboriginal inhabitants.”
GEORGETTE OBOMSAWIN

If Jacques Cartier seemed to see the animals he encountered during his travels as“savage beasts”, Georgette Obomsawin adopts ornithologist's approach when she takes an inventory of Cartier's birds. Everything seems to be going well in this avian world, pretty as the proverbial picture. Then we see two little tombstones, beside the passenger pigeon and the great penguin, lending a sombre note to this idyllic picture. Obomsawin's other work, titled La nature vivante javéllisée, plunges us into a hallucinatory universe in which, by a strange turn, a normal house cat becomes a beste sauvage in turn.