The arrival of a film of such consummate visual prowess as Seth and Peter Scriver’s Endless Cookie (2025) merits celebration; perhaps, this explains its constancy in film festival lineups ever since it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. That said, the Scrivers’ animated documentary is no—pardon me—cookie cutter concoction, the likes of which dominate most festivals like Sundance nowadays. Endless Cookie is much more like a vortex, or a dream, than your usual film—a wonderful, delirious window into the myths and traditions of Shamattawa, a First Nations community in Northern Manitoba, Canada.
Seth Scriver made his first film, Asphalt Watches, over ten years ago at this point, back in 2013. Made in collaboration with Shayne Ehman, the film adapts the duo’s wild cross-country road trip into a series of crude—an adjective that can describe both the film’s low-budget animation, as well as its irreverent funny bone—vignettes. Similarly, Endless Cookie is also the result of a collaboration. This time, between Seth Scriver and his half-brother Peter, an Indigenous man who lives mere miles away from the Arctic Circle with his nine children. A psychedelic exploration of Shamattawa life, as much as it is a madcap experiment in family portraiture, Endless Cookie moves freely through a series of anecdotes told by Peter. Some are personal remembrances, others local myths, and there’s even total non sequiturs thrown in there; nevertheless, Seth treats each story’s cinematic representation with the selfsame approach, wading through the anarchy of his half-brother’s digressive storytelling to find truths that correspond with his community’s shared history and experiences.
It's difficult to pinpoint analogs to Scriver’s animation, which is outright dazzling and inventive in how it always finds new ways to seamlessly transition from one scene to the next. In this regard, the film’s transformational schema most resembles the mutable style of Hungarian animators like Marcell Jankovics and Keresztes Dóra; although, Scriver’s time spent at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design studying sculpture and plastics is also worth highlighting apropos of his unique animation style. As far as their tone goes, Scriver’s films most resemble the kindred ribaldry of contemporaries Wong Ping and fellow Canadian Barry Doupé. Though, as far as this constellation of talented, animated jokesters goes, Scriver must be singled out for his commitment to collaborative filmmaking, and his intentness on making personal films. Endless Cookie is a film full of whimsical detours and absurdities, but it’s clear throughout that such imaginative gambles are in-step with its creator’s innermost idiosyncrasies.
Endless Cookie screens Saturday, April 19, at the Marina Theater as part of the 68th SFFILM Festival. See the rest of our coverage for this year's SFFILM Festival.
