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Review: ‘Keepers of the Game’ Sings of Young Women and Lacrosse

The Salmon River Shamrocks, a Native American girls lacrosse team, in the documentary “Keepers of the Game.”Credit...Peter Eliot Buntaine
Keepers of the Game
NYT Critic’s Pick
Directed by Judd Ehrlich
Documentary
1h 22m

If you’ve cheered on a daughter at a high school sporting event, you’ll identify with Judd Ehrlich’s exhilarating documentary “Keepers of the Game.” If you’ve lived in a small town, as do the resilient athletes in this movie, you’ll probably connect even more. And if you are a fan of lacrosse, a game originated by Native Americans, you may relate most of all.

“Keepers of the Game” is about the Salmon River Shamrocks, a girls’ varsity lacrosse team near Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, in Canada and upstate New York, during their 2015 season. The pressures aren’t just on the field. There is the historical oppression of the American Indian, a fact never lost on the players. Boys call a local radio station to express doubts about the suitability of girls for lacrosse. Tsieboo Herne, a high school senior and the team captain, first embraced the game to fight depression. The ninth-grade goalie Marcella Thomas, who lives on a reservation with her mother and who once found her father’s dead body after a horseback-riding accident, grapples with self-doubt. And there are the Shamrocks’ regional rivals, the Massena Central Red Raiders, whom they face in a climactic championship.

There are heroic adults here, including Hawi Thomas, Marcella’s patient mother, and Elisha King, a firm, nurturing coach. There is also deft editing, artful camerawork and effective music in abundance; Mr. Ehrlich (“Magic Camp”), an Emmy-winning documentarian, clearly knows his craft.

I won’t say how this movie ends. But the film is about much more than the game.

A correction was made on 
April 27, 2016

Because of an editing error, a picture credit on Friday with a film review of the documentary “Keepers of the Game” omitted the photographer’s given name. The photograph of a girls lacrosse team chronicled in the documentary was taken by Peter Eliot Buntaine, not Eliot Buntaine.e.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Review: ‘Keepers of the Game’ Sings of Young Women and Lacrosse. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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