40 Acres features Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler) and her family, descendants of African-American farmers who settled in rural Canada after the first Civil War. In a famine-decimated near future, they now struggle to safeguard their land.Rafy/Mongrel Media
It has been seven years since 40 Acres, the long-gestating debut feature from director, screenwriter and producer R.T. Thorne, was first announced. A dystopian thriller about a family protecting their homestead from cannibals, the film was initially slated as a microbudgeted feature in Telefilm’s Talent to Watch program. In the years since, the project grew bigger in scale and budget to meet both Thorne’s ambitions and the present moment.
I probably don’t have to point out how the world keeps inching closer to the bleak future that Thorne imagines: an every-man-for-himself landscape borne from a viral pandemic, a devastating food crisis and violent societal collapse. In interviews with the director and cast, which took place before the U.S. launched strikes on Iran, that was all top of mind.
“We were filming in October of 2023,” says 40 Acres star Danielle Deadwyler, reflecting on the start of the horrifying conflict in Israel and Gaza that continues to escalate. “The world had shifted tragically and violently.”
Now, she says, the film is being released as the U.S. government violates human rights and drives an anti-immigrant agenda, making Americans question democracy itself. “This is a peculiar, prescient moment, artistically, as well as politically.”
Deadwyler, an executive producer on 40 Acres, plays a U.S. Army vet and fiercely protective matriarch to a blended family. Alongside her husband, played by Michael Greyeyes, she trains their children to work and protect their land, instilling a shoot-on-sight mentality when it comes to outsiders – lest desperate cannibals scale their fences.
The film is a potent and refreshing genre exercise. A Western set in a dystopian environment, it’s loaded with giddy, sometimes disturbingly up-close and gruesome kills; a sense of musicality you would expect from Thorne (one of the directors behind the music video for Sean Paul’s Temperature); and allegorical layers much like Blood Quantum (which also starred Greyeyes) and Night Raiders before it.
Thorne’s debut feature, about land and trauma passed down through generations, puts the marriage between Black and Indigenous resistance front and centre.Rafy/Mongrel Media
Deadwyler brings her trademark intensity to the role, echoing some of her recent and memorable work as the devastated mother fighting for justice in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, or the woman grappling with legacy and inherited traumas in Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson.
Like the latter, 40 Acres is also about land and trauma passed down across generations. Its crystal ball outlook on a desperate future, in which the family at the story’s centre fends off a new colonizing force, builds off the current moment and a shared history of dispossession among Black and Indigenous communities. The title refers to the “40 acres and a mule” promised to those freed from slavery during the U.S. Civil War. Alongside so many treaties with Indigenous communities, the promise was broken.
“You look at America now,” says Greyeyes, whose Galen is the film’s calming force, according to Thorne. “You look at poverty and all the problems that are associated with it – you can just work your way back to not having land.”
40 Acres is a rare instance where the marriage between Black and Indigenous resistance, which are too often spread across parallel tracks going in the same direction, is front and centre.
Thorne, who co-wrote 40 Acres with novelist Glenn Taylor, was inspired by Indigenous characters in dystopian narratives, whose communities already survived an apocalypse.Rafy/Mongrel Media
Thorne, who co-wrote 40 Acres with novelist Glenn Taylor, crafted the story with Greyeyes in mind. He resonated with comments Greyeyes made in the past, about Indigenous characters often appearing in dystopian narratives, because their communities already survived an apocalypse. Thorne felt the same could be said for a lot of people of African descent.
“Colonialism strips us of our histories and in many cases of our languages, our religions,” he says. “But there’s a shared resilience between the two communities.”
Greyeyes points to music as an example of the cultural exchange and joint resistance he calls “frontiers of inclusion.” He describes how chord structures and diatonic scales in African music transformed when it arrived on Turtle Island. “All of a sudden, we had blues and jazz.”
The movie’s historical context runs deep. Thorne and his cast find a remarkable way to whittle it all down into an intimate family story, where the central tension between Deadwyler’s Hailey and her pubescent son Manny (Kataem O’Connor) can carry the bigger conversations.
In the domestic sense, Hailey is the overprotective mom. In the greater context of her world, she’s an isolationist. Manny is eager to break free and connect with a larger community, especially when he catches sight of a young woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) who his mom would deem a threat.
Their dynamic, Thorne reveals, is largely based on his own relationship with his mother, a Trinidadian immigrant who had to fortify herself and her children against the bigotry in Canada. That’s an intimacy you can feel in the movie’s most frightening scene, not when the cannibals come skulking, but when Hailey catches Manny and Diaz-Rojas’s Dawn together in a barn. The all-too familiar foul glare that Deadwyler gives in that moment is soul-withering.
“Everybody gets the high stakes of your family being threatened,” Thorne says. “But I think one of the highest stakes that we’ve all probably experienced, as people, is your mom catching you with somebody that you shouldn’t be with.”
“I wanted to take this relationship and project it onto the highest stakes possible.”
40 Acres opens across Canada on July 4.
