Beans Parent Guide

It’s hard to imagine that a golf course could result in barricades, evacuations, and death, but that’s exactly what happened in the sleepy Canadian exurbs of Montreal in 1990. The decision to expand a nine-hole golf course in the town of Oka, Quebec, destroying an indigenous burial ground in the process, sparked a conflict with the Mohawks of Kanehsatake that would consume the summer. To protect their ancestors’ graves, local Mohawks set up roadblocks, only to face anti-riot actions from the provincial police force, which left one officer dead. In the meantime, sympathetic Mohawks from the Kahnawake reserve south of Montreal blockaded the Mercier Bridge, effectively strangling commuter traffic. As tempers heated up, the Canadian Armed Forces were called in to bring the protests to an end.

Set in Kahnesatake, this movie follows a 12 year old girl named Takehentahkhwa (Kiawenti:io), but known as Beans. A vibrant, ambitious tween, Beans has applied to a prestigious school so she can pursue her artistic and academic dreams. But when the barricades go up, she gets a different type of education: one about violence, prejudice, and hatred.

Beans can be a painful film to watch, especially when Beans and her little sister Ruby (Violah Beauvais) are directly affected by the events unfolding around them. Desperate to become “tough” enough to stand up for her people, Beans starts hanging out with a group of teenagers, led by a hard-boiled girl named April (Paulina Alexis), with predictably bad results.

It’s this friendship with April that produces much of the negative content in the film. April introduces Beans to alcohol and soon has her drinking booze socially as well as chugging liquor out of the bottle while she’s distraught. It’s worth remembering that this isn’t at a bunch of university students playing beer pong – April’s group are teenagers and Beans is 12 years old. She’s not a teenager; she’s a child who’s learning that stress can be numbed by alcohol. Also upsetting is an attempt to force Beans into unwanted sexual activity. Compared to these issues, the movie’s 70 sexual expletives almost seem like a second tier concern.

On top of these problems, there’s plenty of violence seen on screen and referred to in conversation and news clips from the era. There’s conflict and tension on the barricades but the most disturbing scenes are personal – angry Quebeckers throwing rocks at the car driven by Beans’s mother, Beans being punched and whipped by April in a horrifying attempt to make her “tough”, a traumatized Beans beating up a young white girl, Beans cutting herself to cope with her emotional turmoil. This is definitely not your standard “what I did on my summer vacation” movie.

Despite the negative content, I’m not delivering a blanket condemnation of the film. Yes, the content is unsuitable and sometimes egregious. But director Tracey Deer says the movie draws on her memories of the Oka crisis, and I believe that she has created a film that accurately recreates her experiences. That said, parents and teachers are going to want to be very careful about showing this movie to young people. It can help them understand the experiences of indigenous people and can help teens develop empathy. But the negative content is disturbing and the attempt at sexual coercion could be triggering for someone with past trauma.

The most damning part of the film isn’t that it contains negative content. The real horror here is that for too many indigenous people, the content that horrifies us is their lived reality.