Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) Canada will have to apologize for a long time for what it did during the residential school era. To recap for anyone unfamiliar with our national shame: For a long time, Canada promoted a policy in which First Nation children were forcibly taken to boarding schools away from their families in order to pursue a policy of cultural assimilation. This policy produced horrifying results with widespread child abuse by adult staff—the stories emerging from that era are still stomach-churning and the schools have had an incredibly damaging impact on Canada’s First Nation population. Rhymes for Young Ghouls takes us deep into that horror, but be warned that the film’s treatment of the topic is not the one you expect. Focusing on a teenage girl growing up without parents in the early 1970s, it’s a film that takes us into the drug-fuelled underworld of the reserve, delves into a healthy dose of magical realism and provides some hard-hitting catharsis for the oppressed heroine, as played by Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs in a terrific performance. Writer-director Jeff Barnaby is writing from the heart with modern idioms—hearing the 1970s characters talk about zombies in the modern sense may not be historically correct, but it makes the film accessible and clearly prefigures his follow-up Blood Quantum (even sharing some character names, suggesting that it’s a sequel). The result is a surprisingly high-energy take on a famously depressing topic, and one that is surprisingly lively and up-to-the moment. I’m keeping an eye out for Barnaby’s next project, because in two feature films he has established himself as having one of the strongest voices in Canadian cinema at this time. Rhymes for Young Ghouls is not the film you’re expecting from its description—it’s significantly better.