2020 Directed by Tracey Deer
Twelve-year-old Beans is on the edge: torn between innocent childhood and reckless adolescence; forced to grow up fast and become the tough Mohawk warrior she needs to be during the Oka Crisis, the turbulent Indigenous uprising that tore Quebec and Canada apart for 78 tense days in the summer of 1990.
빈즈, Beans - A Pequena Guerreira, Бинс, 小豆豆
1. Indigenous people have typical right of passages, too. We fall in love, have siblings, try to be more grown up than we are. Crazy, but true.
2. I’ve never seen another coming of age film where a huge crowd of racist protestors throw rocks through car windows, a blockade was happening because the government was breaking the law in order to build a golf course, & archive footage is shows all this is based in truth.
3. I don’t remember a movie having this sort of impression on me since last year’s The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open.
4. I laughed, I sobbed (several times), and now I want to watch it again.
#TIFF20
"It comes as a great shock to discover that the country, which is your birth place, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.” - James Baldwin
Beans is a sensitive coming-of-age story centering a Mohawk youth (Tekehentahkhwa, or "Beans") whose relatable struggles with self-discovery is situated within a historical tale depicting the harrowing realities of the Mohawk resistance at Kanesatake.
Before "retiring" from activist work (for various reasons), I previously led the "social justice" division for a secular humanist non-profit involved in human rights advocacy. As part of my work, and through ties that I had with Indigenous activists, I was very briefly present…
“My name is Tekehentahkhwa.”
One of my most anticipated of the year proves itself enormously! Beans delivers a powerful punch, walking the line of serious social commentary and uplifting coming-of-age just as its central figure, Tekehentahkhwa (nicknamed Beans), walks the line between childhood and adolescence.
Tracey Deer’s film is infused with both her history of working in documentary filmmaking and her own lived experiences of the Oka Crisis, making for an intimate portrayal of social, internal, and familial tensions.
I laughed, I cried, and that final scene landed wonderfully.
SIFF 2021 Watch #11
I loved that the film was entirely from the perspective of a Mohawk family. I needed to see that. Most Canadians need to see that. It is still hard to believe that it was over a golf course; I mean, any day of the week a sacred burial ground wins/should win over a golf course. Of course, it wasn't really about that. As far as I can tell it was a fight for power, for respect, for standing, for integrity. A proud people tired of being treated like the gum on white people's shoes.
It was nice to see a coming of age story within this reality. It made it more real somehow. No matter what is happening in the…
Suddenly when there's a coming of age with a BIPOC youth, it's tropey and overdone. Kk. White kids get a new one every week and it's not overdone then, it's apparently endearing. You want a doc about the Oka crisis instead? Well that has been done but I doubt you watched. It's not up to a filmmaker to fit the entire history in a single feature, when she's just trying to tell a particular story set in that time that's partially based on her own experience. If "tropes" hold our truth and we want to show how they're altered by our racial and gender based traumas, we're allowed to do that. Wish people knew the hurdles BIPOC people jump to…
Miami Film Festival 2021
In one of the first scenes from Beans, our titular character drops the F-bomb for the first time in her life after a minor injury, marking a milestone in her road towards adolescence. In another scene, she sits, afraid, in a moving car that is being attacked by a group of rioters angered with her community, in a clear case of racism. These two scenes couldn’t feel more different from one another, but these examples are precisely what make Beans the unique drama that it is.
Beans follows an indigenous tween navigating girlhood, struggling to form her own identity during turbulent times. But this coming-of-age story is also set against the backdrop of the Oka Crisis,…
Very glad to see this nab second runner up at TIFF, because it's the type of story that needs to be supported and appreciated for its humanity - particularly within the well worn coming of age genre. It certainly has its flaws, as many debuts do. Namely, it doesn't fully meld its coming of age beats with the crisis being depicted, and even though the point of the story is how jarring it is in this young girl's life, it feels on screen like it's trying to bite off a bit more than it can chew thematically. Certain plot points and pieces of character development feel surface level because the film sometimes rushes back and forth to real doc footage…
Not quite like any other coming-of-age movie that I've seen from recent years, but in how Tracey Deer's background has informed what we're seeing onscreen in Beans it leaves an impact that you can't shake off so easily. Being a coming-of-age movie set against the Oka crisis of 1990, the manner in which the perspective of its titular character builds with telling this story would be more than enough to show why stories of this sort need to be told more. It's always riveting, but with that experience of being an Indigenous person growing up amidst one of the most shameful moments in Canada's history, Deer finds a way around that conventional coming-of-age structure to show a more beautiful story all around.
Knowing already that this was the second runner-up for the TIFF People's Choice Award, it only leaves me eager for what's to come of Tracey Deer's future as a filmmaker.
A lot of the basic features of this movie are driven by necessity. If you have a movie about indigenous girlhood during a crisis there are a bunch of bases you are expected to touch. I think progressive Canadian audiences have expectations of certain subjects to be brought up and particular outcomes. All these expectations could have overwhelmed the movie and made it trite and wooden. Instead there is a lot of heart and I enjoyed the movie a lot. Like the real world, people make serious mistakes and confused choices throughout, wandering from one danger to another while trying to keep up hope. There's a didactic element to all this but it never becomes absurd.
Beans is a Canadian indigenous coming of age story set during the 1990 Oka crisis in Quebec.
A genius reworking of the genre, Beans sets itself apart not by reconstructing the guts of the coming of age story but by emphasizing the context. Beans's character isn't pushed to changed because of family or highschool drama but rather because of a harsh bigoted reality that is rearing is ugly face right at her. It's growing up out of self defense.
It's an engaging character study that couldn't come at a more relevant time in Canadian culture. It doesn't shy away from harsher realities and presents it's political issues with a sense of urgency. It reminded me at times of Spike Lee's…
