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Per Native Online News Team
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Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone is once again on the silver screen, this time in the recent film Fancy Dance, now available on Apple TV+.
In the 90-minute film created by Erica Tremblay (Seneca-Cayuga), Gladstone plays Jax, a queer Native woman living on the Seneca-Cayuga Nation Reservation in Oklahoma. After her sister goes missing, Jax is tasked with caring for her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), while also struggling to keep her in custody. The film touches on themes of Missing and Murdered Native Women, the Indian Child Welfare Act and tribal sovereignty.
Lily
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“What begins as a quest gradually transforms into a much deeper investigation into the complexities and contradictions of Indigenous women navigating a colonized world while at the mercy of a broken justice system,” Apple said of the film in a statement.
Fancy Dance originally premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. For over a year, the film sat untouched until Apple acquired it in February. It opened in limited theaters in late June and is now available to stream on Apple TV+, starting June 28.
In March, Native News Online spoke to Gladstone ahead of the Oscars. She received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress as Mollie Burkhart in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a film that follows a stoic Osage woman in the 1920s whose relatives were murdered by her white husband (Leonardo DeCaprio) in pursuit of oil wealth.
The irony: A century after the FBI was created to save Native lives and investigate a series of murders in the Osage Nation, Native people are disappearing or murdered more often than any other race in the country. The FBI, the agency responsible for investigating many of the crimes in Indian Country, has done little to stop the crisis.
Gladstone compared the plot of Fancy Dance to a modern-day Killers of the Flower Moon.
“It’s really amazing how much these (Fancy Dance and Killers of the Flower Moon) need to be seen together,” Gladstone told Native News Online in March. “Because it’s the same issues 100 years later, in the same land. Times change, but these systemic issues remain.”
In February, Native News Online interviewed Tremblay about his work in creating Fancy Dance, a film that was written and filmed in Oklahoma on Cherokee land.
“We made the film with so many incredible Oklahoma and Native American crew members, and making the film with my friends and collaborators is a dream,” she said. “I just hope it reaches as many Native American living rooms as possible.”
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