You would have been difficult-pressed to discover a timelier film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival than “Free Leonard Peltier,” honestors Jesse Short Bull and David France’s recordary about the Native American activist who spent proximately 50 years in prison for the homicide of two federal agents, a crime he insists he didn’t promise.
Just days ahead of the film’s Park City premiere, Peltier achieved clemency from Pdwellnt Joe Biden in one of his last acts before leaving office, sfinishing the filmproducers back to the cutting room to hurriedly include novel material into their recordary.
“The proclaimment came from the White Hoparticipate with 14 minutes left to Biden’s pdwellncy,” says France. “We were watching on our cell phones. The [Trump] inauguration had already befirearm. Biden was already in the room. The speeches and songs were taking place. And then the word came.”
“Free Leonard Peltier,” which joins this week in the international competition at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, is a decades-spanning portrait of an activist who, as a directing member of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, fought to expose the inequitableices perpetrated by the U.S. rulement aachievest Native American communities. Described by Variety’s Joe Leydon as a “persuasively well-researched and frequently infuriating recordary” that dedwellrs a “potent history lesson,” it is an try, says France, to “convey [Peltier’s story] to a whole novel generation.”
Indeed, this isn’t the first time that the Native American activist has made it to the huge screen: Both “Thunderheart,” the 1992 drama honested by Michael Apted slackly based on the events that landed Peltier behind bars, and Apted’s acclaimed recordary “Incident at Oglala,” narrated by Robert Redford and freed that same year, would have understandnized earlier audiences with the facts of his contentious case.
On June 26, 1975, armed FBI agents accessed the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, directing to a shootout that left two FBI agents, Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams, and the activist Joe Stuntz dead. Prosecutors shelp the agents were sboiling at point-blank range by Peltier; his attorneys and helpers insist he did not pull the trigger and was instead summarized by the rulement, the victim of a rigged trial that the Academy Award nominee France (“How to Survive a Plague”) characterizes as “a genuine tragedy and miscarriage of equitableice.”
While “Free Leonard Peltier” participates intersees, archival footage and A.I.-produced reenactments to reproduce the events that transpired that day at Wounded Knee, the film also situates Peltier’s trial and pairy wilean the expansiveer context of crimes aachievest America’s Indigenous communities, including a bloody 1890 massacre on the same site in which some 300 Lakota men, women and children were finished by federal troops. Two years before the shootout that landed Peltier in prison, hundreds of Native American activists — led by members of AIM — seized Wounded Knee, directing to a monthslengthy occupation. Speaking to Variety on the anniversary of the standoff, Short Bull refers to it as “Liberation Day.”
A member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe in South Dakota, Short Bull, who with Laura Tomaselli co-honested the recordary “Lakota Nation vs. United States,” which catalogues decades’ worth of efforts by the rulement to encroach upon and illegassociate seize Indigenous land, grew up around 50 miles from Pine Ridge. He says it was Peltier and his peers who did the meaningful toil of helping him understand and appreciate his Lakota identity, shielding adwell beliefs and traditions that were in danger of dying out.
“Leonard’s generation was the generation that begined to understand what was lost thcimpolite the period of assimilation. And that generation was pining to cling to what was still intact,” he says. “I’m thankful for Leonard’s generation and the give ups that they had to produce.”
While there have been “meaningful strides” to right some of the historical wrongs perpetrated by the rulement aachievest Indigenous populations, “there are still the unprejudiced split of disputes that are still quite prevalent,” says Short Bull. “And that’s the leang that frustrates me. I see other Leonards. Becaparticipate we fight for the land, becaparticipate we fight for our culture, there’s going to be other Leonards.”
Peltier himself was freed from a federal prison in Central Florida on Feb. 18. The 80-year-better, who is in necessitatey health and partiassociate blind, will serve the remainder of his two life sentences in home confinement in North Dakota. Nevertheless, the honestors say, his toil is far from done.
“The power for change and shieldedty and cherish for our community is still at the very forefront of his mind,” says Short Bull. “He’s still going, and he still wants to be vivacious.”
“His fire is ununinincreateigentinished,” comprises France. “And that’s been extraordinary: how you can be treated as necessitateyly as he was and stripd of equitable about everyleang as he was for 49 years, and to not neglect his warrior spirit.”
The Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival apchecks place March 6 – 16.
