FANCY DANCE
CLOSING NIGHT FILM.
JUNE 22, 2023.
GGHC Auditorium: NMAI in New York
Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House
One Bowling Green, New York, NY 10004
(212) 514 - 3700
ABOUT
DIRECTOR: Erica Tremblay (Seneca/Cayuga)
DATE COMPLETED: 2022
COUNTRY: USA
FILM CATEGORY: Drama
LENGTH OF FILM: 90 min
PRODUCERS: Deidre Backs, Erica Tremblay, Heather Rae, Nina Yang Bongiovi, Tommy Oliver
CAST: Lily Gladstone, Isabel Deroy-Olson, Ryan Begay, Shea Whigham, Audrey Wasilewski
SYNOPSIS
Following her sister's disappearance, Jax, a Native American hustler (Lily Gladstone) kidnaps her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) from the child's white grandparents and sets out for the state powwow in hopes of keeping what is left of their family intact. The pair hit the road and scour the backcountry to track down Roki’s mother. What begins as a search gradually turns into a far deeper investigation into the complexities and contradictions of how Indigenous women at the mercy of a failed justice system move through a colonized world.
An urgent drama grounded in its observant depiction of reservation life, Fancy Dance establishes director/co-writer Erica Tremblay as a filmmaking talent to watch. It premiered at Sundance, where Harper's Bazaar named it one of the festival's "must-see films," calling it a "resolute, heart-wrenching and ultimately affectionate" film that "wisely reaches truths both historical and contemporary through a present-day study of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) epidemic."
DIRECTOR'S BIO
Erica Tremblay is an award-winning writer and director from the Seneca-Cayuga Nation. Her short film Little Chief premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. She is a Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Lab fellow and an SFFilm Rainin Grant recipient. Tremblay was the executive story editor on Dark Winds, an AMC series produced by George R.R. Martin and Robert Redford. She is the executive story editor on season two of Reservation Dogs at FX and also directed an episode. Together with Sterlin Harjo, she will be co-writing and executive producing a series adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Yellow Bird for Paramount+. Tremblay lives on Cayuga Lake in upstate New York, where she studies her Indigenous language.