"This award-winning short drama, directed by Lisa Jackson, comes out of a project called 'The Embargo Collective,' a project of Toronto's imagineNATIVE Festival. A group of seven international Indigenous filmmakers interested in collaboration and open to artistic challenge were brought together and asked to construct a set of obstructions that would encourage each of them to push their creative boundaries in making a short film. Two common principles prevailed: the theme was Patience and the films were to contain no spoken English. Documentary filmmaker Lisa Jackson was asked to create a musical that would include heavy metal, set decoration, and include both actors and non-actors. SAVAGE is the result. It's late summer, the 1950s, and a young native girl is on her way to residential school. A Cree woman in her kitchen sings a lullaby in her native language. When the girl arrives at her destination, she undergoes a transformation that turns the woman's gentle voice into a howl of anger and pain. Once installed in the residential school, life is stern and there aren't many chances to be a kid...except when no one is watching."