On the one hand, the guy who creates the team is a white teacher from the south, played by Ben Schnetzer. But the game in question is lacrosse, a First Nations sport (though not Inuit) with at least a thousand-year history. As the film notes darkly, the suicide rate in 2004, when it’s set, was 11 times the national rate, or 121 per 100,000 people. The Grizzlies gets into only a few minor scrapes on its way to a rousing finale that beautifully subverts the sports-movie trope of the come-from-behind victory. And the soundtrack, stocked with wildly modern First Nations music, has almost as much to say as the story on the screen.

Source: National Post April 17, 2019 15:33 UTC