Critics reviews

A couple of the film's more evocative images capture the thick black smoke rising from possessions people have decided they no longer have any use for and have thus lit on fire—in one instance an easy chair, and in another the husk of a stripped car's chassis. But that's not to suggest that The Seventh Fire sets out to aestheticize these hardscrabble conditions.

The only genuine moments of peace in the searing documentary "The Seventh Fire" come at the very beginning: lyrical shots of headlights moving forward on a long stretch of road at daybreak. After that, the director, Jack Pettibone Riccobono, practically grabs viewers by the backs of their necks and shows them the bleak lives of two residents of Pine Point... The betrayal of Native Americans by larger forces looms over this powerful movie without ever being explicitly discussed.

It clocks in at 78 minutes, but its scope is epic; it appears to jump months and even years... The film keeps us awake, aware, and uncertain, not a bad frame of mind in which to absorb these men's likely tragic lives. It would be enthralling cinema if it weren't just so unimaginably sad.

When the kids sing "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so," it's a disingenuous snap at spiritual dogma that the film makes little effort to resolve. Such is often the problem with this sort of documentary mode, which resigns itself to an ethnographic exploration of a given community, but does so without any form of contextualizing or disorienting measures.

This deeply textured, rueful documentary is centered on two young men suffering the devastating effects of poverty, substance abuse, and neglect... A foundation that intervenes in prisons to substitute Native American traditions for gang membership offers a hint of hope, but a remarkable sequence showing Rob's children debating the merits of Christian and "Indian" beliefs suggests that this, too, is a complex struggle.

Riccobono tries too hard to push the social issues angle of the material, like this project wouldn't be worthwhile unless a moral or a lesson can be found at the end of it. Yet the tragedy of these characters is self-evident, and a late-game swerve into a redemption narrative territory is, if not unwelcome, then certainly jarring.