Twelve-year-old Beans is on the edge, torn between innocent childhood and delinquent adolescence. She’s forced to grow up fast to become the tough Mohawk warrior she needs to be during the Indigenous uprising known as The Oka Crisis, which tore Quebec and Canada apart for seventy-eight tense days in the summer of 1990. Director Tracey Deer, a member of the Mohawk Nation, tells her story of being a child during The Oka Crisis.

“An accessible, unsanitized drama foregrounding Indigenous experience - one that doesn't hedge on depicting embedded Québécois racism and discrimination - [director Tracey Deer] is staking out a fertile patch of filmmaking terrain” (Adam Nayman, Cinema Scope).

(APRIL 28-29)

Director’s Statement: Tracey Deer

This project goes back a long way for me. I was Beans. I was twelve-years-old when I lived through an armed stand-off between my people and the Quebec and Canadian governments known as The Oka Crisis. The Mohawk Nation of Kanesatake and Kahnawà:ke stood up to a formidable bully—and won. That summer I knew I wanted to become a filmmaker and vowed to one day tell this story. Canadians did not experience that summer as we did. The media painted us as terrorists. Our neighbours attacked us. Our basic human rights were violated. And instead of offering protection, the provincial police and Canadian army aimed their weapons at us. Sound familiar?

Thirty years later, these same scenes are playing out across our television screens as people stand up for racial and social justice across North America. They too are being met with violence, instead of support. With this film, I want Canadians and audiences around the world to experience what it was like to be in the crosshairs of so much hate and anger and the destructive impact it had on me and my people. These kinds of experiences shatter innocence, confidence, and hope. Even though this film takes place in 1990 and shows how bad things were, these messages of intolerance, ignorance, and indifference are still being heard loud and clear across this country today. We live it every day. Like an infection, hate and anger spread and multiply on both sides. We must stop this cycle of violence to protect the next generation from repeating it.