Before the Streets

Chloé Leriche’s Before the Streets (Avant les rues, 2016) is one of those rare films that initially masquerades as a crime drama, only gradually revealing itself as something far more intimate and contemplative: a meditation on guilt, alienation, identity, forgiveness and the possibility of spiritual renewal. Set within the Atikamekw community of Manawan in Quebec, the film follows a young man whose involvement in a crime precipitates a profound personal crisis and, ultimately, a rediscovery of his cultural and spiritual inheritance.

Leriche’s debut feature is remarkable not merely for the subject it chooses to address, but for the manner in which it chooses to address it. Rather than constructing a conventional social-realist portrait of Indigenous deprivation, she creates a quiet, almost meditative drama in which landscape, language, ritual and silence acquire an importance equal to that of the narrative itself. Made in collaboration with members of the Atikamekw community, the film is particularly significant for being the first fiction feature shot in the Atikamekw language.

At its centre is Shawnouk, played with understated intensity by Rykko Bellemare, a young Atikamekw man who appears to have drifted to the periphery of his own existence. Unemployed, directionless and emotionally adrift, he has seen his relationship collapse and spends much of his time smoking, apparently incapable of imagining a future that possesses either purpose or promise. Into this vacuum enters Thomas, a white outsider who persuades Shawnouk to participate in a robbery. The crime goes disastrously awry, and Shawnouk accidentally shoots and kills his accomplice. He flees into the forest, and it is here that the film undergoes its first decisive metamorphosis.

What initially appears to be an escape from the law becomes, instead, an escape into the self. When Shawnouk eventually returns to his community, he must confront the consequences of his actions. His mother’s partner, a policeman, knows the truth, creating a compelling moral tension between institutional justice and a more intimate, community-centred conception of responsibility. Yet Leriche is less interested in asking the conventional question — Will Shawnouk be caught? — than in posing the far more searching one: What will Shawnouk do with his guilt?

That distinction is fundamental to understanding the film.

One of the most striking features of Before the Streets is Leriche’s deliberate refusal to make the murder the gravitational centre of the narrative. The mechanics of the crime are relatively uncomplicated, and the film gives us sufficient information to understand precisely what has occurred. There is little mystery about Shawnouk’s culpability. Consequently, the film gradually sheds the conventions of the thriller and assumes the dimensions of a spiritual character study.

The conventional crime film would ordinarily propel its protagonist towards arrest, interrogation, courtroom proceedings and punishment. Leriche chooses another trajectory. Justice remains an important concern, but it is enlarged beyond the confines of the courtroom. Shawnouk must confront his actions not merely legally, but psychologically, culturally and spiritually. The result is less a narrative of retribution than one of restoration.

Even the title, Before the Streets, possesses an evocative ambiguity. At the most literal level, it gestures towards the geography of the community — the roads and the forest that precede the more familiar structures of the modern world. But the phrase carries a deeper metaphorical resonance. The film intimates that there existed something before the streets: something older than modern institutions, older than bureaucratic structures and perhaps older than the systems of justice through which Shawnouk’s actions would ordinarily be judged. His journey into the forest thus becomes a journey backwards — to tradition, memory, ritual and identity.

The natural landscape is consequently much more than picturesque backdrop. The forest becomes refuge, threat, confessional, place of introspection and, eventually, site of purification. Leriche repeatedly permits the natural environment to dominate the frame, producing a striking visual counterpoint between the claustrophobia of Shawnouk’s ordinary existence and the expansive openness of the wilderness. There is something almost elemental in these sequences. Stripped of the distractions and routines of contemporary life, Shawnouk is compelled to confront the one person from whom there can be no escape: himself.

Among the film’s most memorable passages are those involving traditional rituals, particularly the purification sequence in the woods. Leriche films these moments slowly and with considerable restraint, maintaining a respectful distance, as though the camera itself recognises the danger of intruding upon something it does not entirely possess the cultural vocabulary to explain. This restraint is crucial. She does not annotate every ritual for the benefit of an unfamiliar audience. She allows us to observe, to listen and, in some measure, to remain outsiders.

Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement lies in its refusal to turn Atikamekw culture into exotic ornamentation. There is always a danger when an outsider filmmaker enters an Indigenous community that the resulting work may acquire the character of ethnography: Look at these people and their customs. Before the Streets largely evades that temptation. Its Atikamekw characters are not merely repositories of cultural symbolism or victims of historical injustice. They possess the messy fullness of ordinary human beings: they have families, quarrels, romantic complications, boredom, humour, frustrations and contradictions. Their circumstances may be difficult, but the film does not reduce them to their difficulties.

Nor, importantly, does Leriche romanticise the community. Unemployment, social distress, suicide and difficult living conditions are all present. Yet they emerge organically from the texture of life rather than being paraded before the audience with the conspicuous solemnity of a conventional social-problem film.

Rykko Bellemare is indispensable to the film’s effectiveness. His Shawnouk is neither conventionally charismatic nor immediately sympathetic. He is withdrawn, bewildered, sometimes frustrating and often difficult to read. That is precisely what makes the performance so persuasive. Bellemare does not manufacture sympathy; he inhabits a young man who has lost his bearings. His face becomes almost a landscape in itself, registering suspicion, shame, fear, exhaustion and, eventually, something approaching serenity with a minimum of theatrical embellishment.

The participation of several non-professional performers further strengthens the film’s naturalistic texture. Jacques Newashish is particularly effective as Shawnouk’s mother’s partner, the policeman caught between professional obligation and personal attachment. His character embodies one of the film’s central moral tensions: what happens when institutional justice collides with personal responsibility?

The use of Atikamekw is equally significant. Language here is not a decorative flourish or an anthropological curiosity; it is intrinsic to the film’s conception of identity. The characters speak in the language of their community, and the film permits that language to exist without continually translating, interpreting or domesticating it for an external audience. This gives Before the Streets a cultural specificity that many films dealing with Indigenous communities conspicuously lack. The Atikamekw songs and chants further enrich the film’s distinctive sonic landscape, making language itself part of the process of cultural reclamation.

Glauco Bermudez’s cinematography is another of the film’s understated strengths. The camera moves between intimate close-ups and expansive images of the forest and the community, and this visual grammar subtly mirrors Shawnouk’s psychological trajectory. When he is imprisoned within himself, the camera closes in; when he begins to reconnect with something larger than his individual anguish, the landscape opens outward. The natural world is not merely photographed — it becomes an extension of the protagonist’s interior journey.

The film’s most intellectually compelling dimension, however, is its conception of justice. Before the Streets does not necessarily suggest that conventional justice is meaningless or irrelevant. Instead, it asks whether punishment alone can adequately address the deeper wound produced by wrongdoing. Shawnouk has committed a grave crime; the film never exonerates him. But it asks a more difficult question: what would it mean for him actually to become a different person?

It is here that the traditional rituals acquire their deepest significance. They are not presented as mystical shortcuts capable of magically dissolving guilt. Rather, they represent a process of accepting responsibility, reconnecting with community and recovering a sense of belonging. Leriche thus places two conceptions of justice beside one another: justice as punishment and justice as restoration. The film’s sympathies clearly lie with the latter — not as a negation of accountability, but as an exploration of what accountability might ultimately be intended to achieve.

For a first feature, Before the Streets is remarkably assured. Leriche wrote, directed, produced and edited the film, yet perhaps her most impressive accomplishment is her willingness to listen before speaking. She does not incessantly instruct the audience about what to think of the Atikamekw community. Instead, she watches, waits and observes. That restraint gives the film much of its authenticity and much of its quiet power.

Before the Streets is not an easy film in the conventional cinematic sense. It has little interest in relentless suspense, rapid narrative propulsion or melodramatic confrontation. Its rewards are subtler. It is a film about a young man who has become estranged from his family, his community and, ultimately, himself — and who gradually discovers that redemption may not begin with an escape from his identity, but with a return to it.

The film’s most resonant idea is also its simplest: before the streets, there was the forest; before the institutions, there was the community; and before punishment, there existed the possibility of reconciliation. Leriche does not pretend that tradition can magically annul guilt, nor does she offer spiritual ritual as a convenient absolution for criminal responsibility. What she suggests, more profoundly, is that healing may require guilt to be confronted within a language, landscape and cultural framework that the wounded individual can genuinely call his own.

That is what makes Before the Streets considerably more than a film about an Indigenous criminal, a troubled young man or even the social circumstances that surround him. It is a thoughtful and quietly affecting meditation on belonging: on what happens when an individual becomes estranged from the cultural inheritance that gives identity its contours, and on whether redemption is something that can be imposed from without — or whether, ultimately, it must be discovered within.

In Leriche’s hands, the journey through the forest is therefore not simply a flight from the law. It is a return to the self.