HA’Aki : The Game of Hockey by Iriz Pääbo

The game of hockey is already confusing for as the industry of the ice-age call the sun belt states. You could say that it is soccer on ice and even then that is another sport that the States has not embraced as a whole. Many consider hockey a Canadian sport, surprising because there are only six teams in Canada and 24 in the States. Many struggle with hockey a bottom feeder in the sports hierarchy in North America. The NFB’s Iriz Pääbo brings us a brilliant interpretation of the basics behind the game. The bare bones of the game is explored in colors and sounds with the building blocks of Canada’s biggest rivalry-the Leafs and Habs. Iriz Pääbo is not a big hockey fan and captures the testosterone of the chemistry of the game known as hockey or HA’Aki. The fundamentals are broken down to the simplest universality form of the game that many grew up watching every Saturday night.

In this short abstract-impressionist film the animation and music were made simultaneously in an organic process of symbiotic creativity. Filmmaker Iriz Pääbo tells the highly subjective story of a complete hockey game using a new cinematic vocabulary she calls “animbits.” Pääbo readily admits she is not the biggest fan of Canada’s national game, so the great, though highly under appreciated NHL stalwart of the ’60s and ’70s, Eric Nesterenko, was her hockey muse in this artistic journey. A lyrical and wonderfully unorthodox interpretation of hockey.