Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil build this spellbinding work of agit-prop around the Ojibwe Nation’s Seven Fires Prophecy, which described with unsettling accuracy the arrival and activities of colonial settlers, while pointing to a hard but not impossible future rebirth of the Ojibwe after a long period when “our spirits were asleep.” This reclamation of ancestral myth carries into the very structure of INAATE/SE/.

Taking a wide overview of aboriginal life in the Sault Ste. Marie region of Ontario and Michigan—where progressive youth, residential-school survivors, shack-dwelling derelicts, and Jesuit priests jockey for their version of history—the Khalils submerge everything in a caustically witty collage of sound and vision that gleefully upends conventional (read: colonial) storytelling and aesthetics. The effect is often rousing, at other times genuinely transcendent, and in all ways righteous as fuck.