This debut feature by Canadian writer-director Jeff Barnaby takes place in 1976 on a Red Crow Indian reservation in rural Quebec. As a history lesson about Canada’s unjust treatment of Native Americans, it’s often eye-opening, but as storytelling it’s clunky and highly familiar, and the period re-creation is seldom convincing. A 16-year-old tomboy, whose mother committed suicide years earlier and whose father is serving a prison sentence for manslaughter, lives a dead-end existence with her pothead uncle; when the father returns home, still furious at the corrupt officials who persecuted him before his arrest, she quickly falls under his influence and slides into a life of delinquency.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls
R • 1 hour 25 min • 2013
