Based on the award-winning novel by Forrest Carver, the film tells the story of an orphaned 8-year-old boy, Little Tree, whose white grandfather and Cherokee grandmother take him to the Great Smoky Mountains in 1935. Grandpa (James Cromwell) enlists the boy's help in the moonshine business, while Grandma (Tantoo Cardinal) and her Cherokee friend Willow John (Graham Greene) teach him about their tribe's history and ways. Although the mountain abounds with revenuers and rattlesnakes, the real danger is the government, which wants to erase the Indian culture. Little Tree is sent to an Indian school where the students are forbidden to speak any language but English and are punished for knowing the mating habits of deer.

Our self-analyzing culture has trouble dealing with moral ambiguity and avoids explaining shades of gray to youngsters, but these situations give The Education of Little Tree its ring of truth. To Grandpa, his lawbreaking is justified because of unjust taxes; to Willow John, resistance to authority carries on the noble tradition of the Trail of Tears. The film's most suspenseful moment comes when Little Tree screams to his unseen jailers at the Indian school that he's sorry for the deed that caused his punishment, even though he doesn't know what he did. Will he forget his heritage and name to save himself, or does he realize that more is at stake?

Adult audiences may quibble with the film's anti-authoritarian tendencies (a bombastic senator is an early figure of fun), and they may disagree with the implicit values of Little Tree's upbringing. But these are not reasons to avoid the film; they are opportunities to have conversations about it outside the theater. Whatever the shortcomings of the film's worldview, it achieves a rare consistency and conviction in communicating that worldview to its audience; in an era of hedged bets at the theater, that alone is laudable.

Children may not understand or appreciate these subtleties at a conscious level right away, but the movie will stick with them as one of those special occasions when something truthful about the world breaks into their sheltered upbringing. Anastas Michos' beautiful photography of endless, misty hills arouses in the viewer the youthful wish for a secret, untouched place of perfect peace. The moving ending to The Education of Little Tree acknowledges that physical places house the soul, but also that growing up means learning to carry one's secret place into an alien land. After watching the film, your child may feel a little braver about her own journey into the future.