Tracey Deer can still remember the sound of
rocks hitting the car, her panicked mother’s orders to “Get down!”, and the
loud smash as a back passenger window shattered, showering glass over her
screaming little sister.
اضافة اعلان
Deer, an Indigenous Canadian filmmaker, was only 12 on August
28, 1990, when a white mob hurled stones and racial insults at vehicles filled
with Mohawk women, children, and the elderly, all trying to evacuate a
reservation near Montreal. The Oka crisis, a dispute between Canadian
authorities and the Mohawk people over land rights, was reaching its height,
and the frightened children crouched on the floor until Deer’s mother could
drive on.
“My sense of safety was stolen from me,” Deer said. “My
sense of self-worth, as of that moment, was nonexistent.” But after spending
most of her adolescence consumed by anger, she said in a video interview, “I
ended up finding a way to channel that instead into my drive to prove all those
people wrong.”
One result is Beans, her first narrative feature, which was
named best picture at the Canadian Screen Awards this year and has collected
more than 20 prizes on the film-festival circuit. The newly released drama is a
long-sought milestone for Deer, 43, a screenwriter, director, documentarian,
and television showrunner. (She was a creator of comedy-drama series “Mohawk
Girls,” streaming on Peacock, as well as a writer for “Anne With an E” on
Netflix.)
A fictionalized version of her experiences, the film focuses
on a bright, ambitious Mohawk girl, nicknamed Beans (portrayed by Mohawk
actress Kiawentiio). She lives with her family on the Kahnawake reserve, as
Deer did, and has applied to enter seventh grade at an elite, mostly white
academy that’s similar to the school Deer went to before graduating from
Dartmouth.
“I wanted to be the one to tell the story,” Kiawentiio said
via video from Canada, where she was shooting the new live-action “Avatar: The
Last Airbender” series for Netflix. Thirteen while filming “Beans,” she felt a
personal connection to the history, having grown up in Akwesasne, a reserve not
far from the conflict. “A lot of people from my community went there and were
helping,” said Kiawentiio, whose own parents were teenagers at the time.
Beans’ journey begins when she is caught up in the real
protests that unfolded after the mayor of Oka, a town near Montreal, announced
plans to expand a golf course onto land containing a sacred Mohawk burial
ground. Devastated by the violence that ensues — she is present when gunfire
erupts at a confrontation between Mohawk demonstrators and police,
precipitating the 78-day crisis — Beans falls in with a rough crowd of Mohawk
teenagers. They include a charismatic boy who tries to force her to perform
oral sex; the scene is based on a sexual assault Deer experienced when she was
20.
“It’s a big story,” said Anne-Marie Gélinas, founder of
EMAfilms, which produced the drama. “And Tracey’s challenge was to talk about,
of course, the bullies outside,” which in the film include the government and
real estate developers. But, Gélinas added in a video call, “she also wanted to
talk about the bullies inside her community.”
Although Beans’ struggles relate specifically to her time
and place, they are likely to resonate with anyone who has raised an adolescent
— or been one. When Beans practices profanity in front of her bedroom mirror,
smiling proudly when she finally utters a curse, it’s impossible not to notice
the doll and stuffed animals still on her bureau. And any viewer will be
alarmed when a tough older girl encourages Beans to harm herself so she will be
impervious to the pain inflicted by others.
“It doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard of the Oka crisis,”
Deer said, adding that the character is coming of age “in a tumultuous,
unwelcoming world that is indicative of where we currently are.”
To show that she was not distorting the historical backdrop,
Deer used archival footage throughout the film, in one case inserting an actor
into the Mohawk protesters in a 1990 news clip. “Nobody remembered it to be so
violent, so negative, so traumatic,” Gélinas said, describing audiences’
reactions in Canada, where the response to “Beans” has been overwhelmingly
positive.
Although the Oka conflict ended in September 1990 with the
cancellation of the golf course expansion, disputes over the land rights
continue. But in the Canadian cultural sphere, the concerns of Indigenous
people are gaining increased attention, said Jesse Wente, chairman of the
Canada Council for the Arts and executive director of the Indigenous Screen
Office in Toronto. (The organization supports Native film projects but did not
contribute to the financing of “Beans.”)
“I think what you’re seeing is maybe an industry that is so
ravenous for stories that it’s realized it has to open the gates beyond its
usual suspects,” Wente, who is Anishinaabe, said in a phone interview. He added
that while Indigenous representation in the Canadian film industry had been
largely confined to documentaries until recent years, artists like Deer were
now delving into many genres. “What that means is that Indigenous cinema is
about to become commercial in a way it never was,” he said.
Likening Deer’s film to Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,”
Wente said, “‘Beans’ is exactly what happens when you empower storytellers from
a community who’ve had stories told about them forever, but rarely have had the
opportunity to tell them themselves.”
But Deer, who lives outside Montreal with her husband,
stepson, and a foster baby boy, often worried that “Beans” would never be made.
Traumatic memories filled her with grief and anxiety as she struggled for years
to write the script. In 2015, Deer finally approached Gélinas about hiring a
story editor, now credited as co-screenwriter: Meredith Vuchnich.
“I was a good barometer,” Vuchnich, who is not Indigenous,
said by phone, explaining that Deer could use her to gauge the general public’s
understanding of the crisis.
Developments in the United States, where the #MeToo and
Black Lives Matter movements have highlighted the inequities faced by women and
people of color, have also made this a propitious moment for “Beans.” The
movie, Deer said, is being released at “the most influential time that it could
come out.”
“I realized my biggest wish back then and even today is to
be seen, to be heard, to be understood,” she added. She reflected on the film’s
final scene, in which the camera lingers on Beans’ face. “That’s why I hang on
her for those seconds that I do,” Deer said. “See her. See us.”
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