A systematically brutalized culture's subjugated displacements resiliently assert themselves in Jeff Barnaby's Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Rimes pour revenants), a hardboiled look at a Mi'kmaq reserve (Red Crow) oppressed by a cruel vindictive Indian Agent and laws requiring children to attend residential schools.
There's friendship, family, camaraderie, language, culture, belonging, humanity.
But the gang of authoritative thugs who govern the place still do everything they can to impoverish.
The film's violent.
It's fight-back or fuck-off as a might-is-right philosophy confronts resistance, ubiquitous altercations, outrageous regulations (no boats on the lake for starters).
Alia (Kawennahere Devery Jacobs) knows how to fight.
Left to be raised by her deadbeat uncle after her father was sent to prison and her mother committed suicide, she establishes a flourishing business which earns her enough cash to pay off the Indian Agent.
Thereby freeing her from the residential school.
But his abusive grip squeezes tighter and tighter, necessitating a potent counterstrike, sounding the call of the warrior.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls isn't shy.
It starkly lays out a ravaged set of institutionalized sterilizations while demonstrating how the victims remain elastically fertile.
Many of the characters are young and their tragic innocence exacerbates the tyranny.
Accentuates the acrimony.
While their communal bonds reify the transcendent life.
Love the analogous relationship between the wolf and the mushroom story and the bloodthirsty pursuit of capital.
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