qathet film society presents
3 Ears Indigenous Film Festival
Endless Cookie
Endless Cookie
Sunday September 27 – 1:30pm
Directed by: Peter Scriver, Seth Scriver
Genre: Documentary / Comedy / Animation
Rated PG – 1hr 37min
Released: 2025
Seth Scriver and Pete Scriver’s Endless Cookie, which premiered at Sundance earlier last year, surely doesn’t lack for imagination. It’s a wildly whimsical, sometimes funny and sometimes pointed documentary about family, storytelling and the often circular nature of time.
The story begins with Seth, represented with a droopy, blue phallic nose, tiny red hat and wiry, sparse mustache, receiving a grant from NFG Canada (a stand-in for the National Film Board of Canada), represented as a right-angle ruler, to do an animation project. Toronto-based Seth’s plan is to go to the First Nations community of Shamattawa to interview his brother Pete.
Pete, represented with a somewhat erect red nose, blue lips, glasses and a black cap, is 16 years older and Indigenous, though they share a white father. Pete is the best storyteller Seth knows, so Seth wants to record a selection of Pete’s tales, presenting them with accompanying animation.
Over the course of the documentary, Pete and other residents of Shamattawa tell various stories — many related to the historical injustices faced by Canada’s First Nations people, a few weirdly supernatural, some related to the frustrations of their current lives, many related to Pete’s youth in 1970s and 1980s Toronto, including drunken, naked misadventures and teenage pranks. The stories sometimes have stories nested within them, with each retelling causing the tales to get shaggier and less formed. Pete’s kids, who grow from children into teens and young adults over the nine years in which Seth is struggling to get the film made (much to the chagrin of the right angle ruler from the NFG, who periodically offers useless notes), get to tell their own stories, some enhanced with the use of recreational drugs.
Endless Cookie simultaneously chronicles the making of the project itself, which took nine years to complete, from receiving government funds to the different stages and challenges of recording Pete’s anecdotes at the crowded home in isolated and frozen Shamattawa (there’s only one store in town) that he shares with nearly a dozen family members and 10 dogs (one of them depicted as a bizarre, four-legged interpretation of Mr. Peanut). The characters’ design doesn’t necessarily reflect the physical appearance of the people they are based on, and yet when near the end of the doc family photos do come on screen, one can see how their animated counterparts capture their essence. For example, Cookie Scriver, Pete’s daughter, is represented as a chocolate chip cookie with legs, while other children appear as colorful blobs with wild hair or inanimate objects with faces.
The theme of the documentary ends up being that “the past is an endless cookie,” a reference either to its general circularity or to Pete’s daughter Cookie, visualized as an adorable talking chocolate chip cookie. Or, explained a different way, “You look to the past, try to make it easy for the future.”