THE STORY – Three young queer Indigenous people’s lives intersect and overlap over the course of 17 hours in downtown Vancouver.
THE CAST – Aalayna, Nizhonniya Austin, Taio Gélinas, Shannon Baker, Renae Morriseau & Kaniehtiio Horn
THE TEAM – Justin Ducharme (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 88 Minutes
Justin Ducharme’s debut feature “Seventeen” opens with the camera locked on a road looking down into Vancouver. It’s a simple frame, but paired with the score’s fantastical, almost otherworldly texture, it immediately signals this city will feel like a different place – not quite the Vancouver of postcards. A guy skateboards into the shot and spray-paints “fuck your luxury condos” on ads near a construction site. Just like that, Ducharme tells you what kind of film this will be: one where luxury is only for some, and everyone else scrapes by underneath it.
That skateboarder is Aiden (Taio Gélinas), and he needs $1,200 by 10 a.m. to hold a place to live. He’s one of three young, queer, Indigenous sex workers whose lives intersect over a single 17-hour stretch in downtown Vancouver – a structure that gives the film its title and ticking-clock urgency. Tamara (Nizhonniya Austin) races to find her passport before her visa expires and she’s forced back across the border. December (Aalayna Primrose) is dealing with the loss of her father, and her mother, whom she hasn’t spoken to since leaving home, won’t stop calling.
Ducharme handles all three with real tenderness. This is clearly a tight-knit community rendered by someone who respects the work. It’s rare to see sex work depicted with this specificity; it’s rarer still to see the film hold both female and male sex work in the same story, treating each with equal weight.
Indigenous storytelling runs underneath and connects everything in the film, giving it a real emotional spine. December and Tamara speak of the Three Sisters peaks outside Canmore. In the Stoney Nakoda legend, the mountain spirit Yanoki turns three sisters to stone to save them from a pursuing grizzly. December, Tamara, and Aiden are the three mountain peaks, and while they’re not fleeing a bear, each of them has had to remake who they are to survive something chasing them: colonial systems, family rupture, a border, poverty. Every character here is homeless in some sense, whether literally or in the deeper way of not knowing where they’re supposed to be, and the film ties that displacement directly to its colonial roots without ever turning didactic.
Tamara’s fury at being at the mercy of a border she didn’t choose lands hard, but she is also the film’s toughest needle to thread. Her anger is clear – rooted in not being treated like a human by society – but that context doesn’t always make her easier to be around onscreen. She’s often cruel to December, who only tries to help her. The film asks a lot of goodwill from the audience to keep sympathizing with someone who spends much of her screen time being ungrateful to the person closest to her. December, by contrast, is the film’s strongest creation: someone who knows what she wants and can hold a line, while visibly wrestling with the difference between what’s right and what’s easy, especially in making peace with the family she left behind.
The film’s rougher edges are hard to overlook. It has the feel of a first feature in ways first features often show – a cast of mostly amateur actors whose line readings don’t always carry the weight the script asks for, and writing that could use another pass to sharpen some transitions. None of that undercuts what Ducharme is capable of, but it means “Seventeen” is a film you admire more for its intentions and authenticity than for its execution, at least on a first watch.
Where the film lands, though, is in its ending, when December and Aiden’s paths finally cross. The two find an unexpected kinship in each other – a quiet, well-earned closing note after 17 hours of near-misses that plays like its own version of that protective transformation, found family catching two people before whatever’s chasing them catches up. A butterfly metaphor threads through the film, one about rebuilding a self and a life from scratch, and by the time the credits roll, you can feel the weight of that, good and bad.
