Rhymes for Young Ghouls

Jeff Barnaby's 2013 Canadian film is set on a Mi'gmaq reserve in 1976. Aila is fifteen and makes money selling weed on the reserve; part of that money is the levy paid to the Indian agent so that children are not sent to the residential school. The agent, Popper, represents both the law and its violence, and the school appears in the film not as a place of education but as a prison. When Aila's father comes out of jail the family's past reopens and she sets a plan of revenge in motion. Barnaby made one of the few fiction films to address Canada's residential school system directly, and does it with the tools of genre cinema, in a hard and at times fantastical register. Devery Jacobs is in her first major role. Who it's for: viewers who can take Indigenous cinema and harsh revenge narrative. Who it's not for: anyone who would rather not approach violence against children and abuse; the film shows them.