The Grizzlies

Miranda de Pencier's 2019 film is based on real events in Kugluktuk, a town in Canada's far north. In the early 2000s this small Inuit community had one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. A teacher arriving from the south starts his students playing lacrosse, and in time a team forms. The film does not claim sport alone is the answer; it holds the consequences of the colonial past, the residential school system and displacement in the background, and shows that the teacher's good intentions have limits too. The production auditioned more than six hundred young people from Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, and the great majority of the cast are Inuit or First Nations. It premiered in Toronto. Who it's for: viewers who want sports drama based on real events and films that centre Indigenous communities. Who it's not for: anyone who would rather not approach a film that deals with suicide directly, because this one shows it plainly.