Beans

Tracey Deer's 2020 Canadian film draws on the director's own childhood. Twelve-year-old Tekehentahkhwa, called Beans, is growing up in the Kahnawake community when the Oka Crisis breaks out in the summer of 1990: a seventy-eight day standoff between the town of Oka and the Kanesatake and Kahnawake communities opposing a golf course built on Mohawk burial ground. Across those weeks Beans is forced out of childhood and into becoming a warrior. Deer lived through the crisis as a child and has said she had to return to that trauma to make the film. Real archive footage is placed inside the fiction; scenes such as white crowds stoning Mohawk vehicles at the barricades are not reconstruction but document. Kiawentiio's performance carries the film. It won best picture at the Canadian Screen Awards. Who it's for: viewers interested in Indigenous storytelling, Canadian history and coming-of-age drama. Who it's not for: anyone unprepared for scenes of racist violence, or not reckoning that the sexual content involving teenagers may be uncomfortable.