A Colony 2018

In rural Quebec, Mylia [Émilie Bierre] begins high school while living with her younger sister Camille [Irlande Côté], and their parents Nathalie [Sylvie Lemay] and Henri [Robin Aubert], near the border of an Abenaki First Nation reserve. Camille endures ongoing bullying from her peers, and Mylia becomes her only true ally, offering quiet loyalty as they navigate the rough waters of adolescence. The home feels heavy with unspoken tensions, and the looming sense of change weighs on both girls as family dynamics shift around them.

At school, Mylia is pulled into a history and citizenship class where she befriends Jacinthe [Cassandra Gosselin-Pelletier]. Jacinthe quickly notices how carefully Mylia takes notes and asks for her help to keep from failing the course. The two girls start to collaborate on homework, and Jacinthe invites Mylia to a party, where an easy warmth and a budding sense of belonging promises a new kind of connection. After a night of drinking, Mylia wakes up at a home on the reserve where a local boy, Jimmy [Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie], lives, and Jimmy’s grandmother offers her a safe place to recover on her couch. When she returns home, she finds her father on the living-room couch for the night, and she denies that she had been drinking. The morning after reveals a shift in the family’s routine and in Mylia’s own understanding of what has happened, leaving her to reconcile the memory with the present.

Mylia grows closer to Jimmy as he helps Camille by letting her use his trampoline. In history class, the discussion turns to readings about Europeans’ early contact with Indigenous peoples in Quebec. As students debate passages that depict Indigenous people through a racist lens, Jimmy explodes in anger, clashing with the other boys in the hallway and earning a suspension. Jacinthe invites Mylia to a Halloween party, where she and her friends plan to dress as the Fifth Harmony. The celebration falls on Camille’s birthday, and Mylia agrees to go, even as the night is tinged with new strains. Later, Mylia meets with Jimmy and he insists that Halloween costumes reveal one’s true self; he announces he will be dressing as an “Indian.” Mylia says she will be dressing as the Fifth Harmony, and the exchange exposes a painful tension about identity and belonging, deepening the rift between the two young people.

Back home, the news hits hard: Nathalie and Henri reveal they are separating, and the prospect of moving out unsettles both girls. Mylia leaves the familiar walls she has known and finds Jimmy again, confessing that she loves him, a moment that feels both hopeful and fragile. Time passes, and Mylia enrolls in a new school, continuing to write to Jimmy about what she learns—like the Scramble for Africa—and about how few of her peers believe her when she says she is from a forest, and that her friend is an “Abenaki warrior.” She acknowledges that many classmates see her as unusual, but she resolves not to change to fit someone else’s idea of normal, choosing instead to embrace her own sense of identity and voice.