Rhymes for Young Ghouls

Rhymes for Young Ghouls is essentially composed of a number of often-seen motifs, but their handling and placement in a captivating setting make this film an experience that remains in the viewer’s memory. Here we have a standard story about the conflict of colonial and indigenous cultures combined with a film about young heroes fighting for their freedom. However, the narrative is set in the environment of a Canadian Indian community in the 1970s and thematises the oppression of the original inhabitants at that time by despotic authorities, particularly Christian boarding schools for the re-education of children. As in the brilliant comic book Scalped, with which the film has several things in common, here the reservation is a place where the original culture has been crushed by the ills of consumerism and capitalism together with rampant crime. The main attraction of the film is the vivid depiction of this world, which straddles the line between sober realism and fantastical mythology, and is equally unbound from and tied to its roots. The story itself, about the clash of Christianity, which replaced spiritualism and mystery with a sadistic doctrine, and Indian culture, whose everyday experience is conversely enveloped in mysticism, can on the one hand be seen as an expression of post-colonial iniquity, when formulaic stories are created primarily for an audience made up of the majority society, who can thus express their sympathy with the previously oppressed ethnic group. On the other hand, however, such films can also serve as emancipatory works for the other, minority audience. (27/02/2014)

I think that the Native American environment is one that is very under-explored at the moment, so it's good that there is a movie being made or comics being written about it. Native American reservations have their own life and are just an example of how much white people destroyed and what consequences their behavior has. This is not about why something is wrong, but how wrong it can be. Rugged and at times very hard to digest. (02/10/2015)