Cinema Scope

NIGHT RAIDERS

he appeal of dystopian narratives hangs on their capacity to hold up a funhouse mirror to the corruption and exploitation of our already extant social realities. Indigenous artists and filmmakers have long underscored the dystopic reality of colonial nation states in their work, and the uptick in dystopic genre cinema over the past decade—from the YA likes of and to the nihilistic parables of and the franchise—has also seen a corresponding rise in Indigenous engagement with the tropes of horror and science fiction, most notably in the oeuvre of Jeff Barnaby (, 2013; , 2019). One of the most intriguing manifestations of this is the interdisciplinary art movement called Indigenous Futurisms (a term coined by the Anishinaabe Indigenous studies scholar Grace L. Dillon), in which the principles of

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