Night Raiders

The year is 2043. After a destructive war across North America, a military occupation seizes control of society. One of their core tactics: taking all children from their families and putting them into State Academies, or forced-education camps. Keeping your child is illegal. Niska is a Cree mother desperate to protect her daughter Waseese, but events force them to separate, leading Niska to join the Night Raiders, a group of Cree vigilantes with the skills to get her daughter back. This compelling, dystopic thriller offers a speculative future that is in striking dialogue with Canada’s colonial past. Night Raiders is not just a powerful allegory told through an Indigenous futurist lens, but a new view of Canada and pan-Indigenous filmmaking, creating one of the most important Canadian sci-fi films in recent memory.

For students and teachers already familiar with popular YA dystopic and science fiction worlds in Hollywood, this film offers a surprising and highly original Indigenous futurist action thriller. The fact that this story echoes the real forced assimilation of Indigenous children in Canada, the US, Australia, and beyond, and includes both Cree and Māori characters, is no coincidence. Night Raiders is a Canada-New Zealand co-production created by Cree Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet from Northern Saskatchewan, alongside wāhine Māori producers Chelsea Winstanley and Ainsley Gardiner from New Zealand, showcasing pan-indigenous collaborations in filmmaking. Set in an authoritarian state, rebuilding after a civil war in the not-so-distant future, Goulet creates a riveting, relevant, and ultimately hopeful story of love and triumph. In this bleak society of the future, there is resilience and hope — Niska and the group of determined Indigenous resistance work tirelessly to free children from the state, and ultimately, they succeed.

Night Raiders should become the most talked-about Canadian film of the year. And for good reason.

Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail

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