Night Raiders, director Danis Goulet (Cree-Métis). The year is 2043. A military occupation controls disenfranchised cities in post-war North America. Children are property of the State. A desperate Cree woman joins an underground band of vigilantes to infiltrate a State children’s academy and get her daughter back. Night Raiders is a female-driven dystopian drama about resilience, courage and love.

Goulet says, “I wanted to create an oppressive regime, but … every single element in the film was something that already had been imposed on Indigenous people.” Examining these issues through the lens of science-fiction gives audiences a new way to grapple with an uncomfortable subject matter. “Speculative fiction exists as a warning . . . but the impulse for it to happen again is always there,” with the added specter of weaponized technology.

Goulet has long had a focus on the way past, present and future all connect, the idea of a continuum, and countering the idea of Indigenous people only existing in the past. In Night Raiders she combines echoes of the past with subtle warnings about artificial intelligence – who controls technology and how is it deployed? In Cree and English with English subtitles. (Distributed in the U.S. by Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2021, 101 min.).

This is an in-theater screening!

Suggested donation of $5.00.