‘Free Leonard Peltier' Follows A 50-Year Trail To Justice For Native American Icon – Thessaloniki Int'l Documentary Festival
It's an elusive dream for so many docmakers: to impact legislation, to find justice, to make a difference. To change the world. With Free Leonard Peltier, filmmakers Jesse Short Bull (Lakota Nation vs. United States) and David France (How To Survive a Plague) achieved their eponymous goal: Seven days before the world premiere of their film at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in January, President Joe Biden, in his last act before leaving office, issued a clemency order, commuting Peltier's sentence to home confinement.
The Native American activist had served nearly 50 years in a federal prison, having been convicted of murder of two FBI agents in a shootout at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. Peltier's attorneys and supporters would wage a decades-long battle through appeals, writs and petitions to circuit courts, federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court and three U.S. presidents, alleging numerous incidents of misconduct by the FBI in Peltier's case. His cause became a global cause célèbre, attracting the support of Nobel Laureates, scholars, artists, and civil rights leaders.
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The Free Leonard Peltier team rushed back to the editing room to add this happy ending, working at a feverish pace to craft a new DCP for the January 27th premiere. Peltier was released on February 18 from a federal correctional facility in Florida to home confinement at the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. The film screens Wednesday at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival after celebrating its international premiere at TiDF Tuesday night.
While Jesse Short Bull and David France hadn't worked together before, they both came to the project with a long history of activism–and a deep admiration for Peltier and his iconic stature. France was in the audience at a 2022 screening of Short Bull's previous film, Lakota Nation vs. United States. Short Bull's producers, Jody Archambault, Jane Myers and Bird Runningwater, made the introduction between the filmmakers.
France has had a distinguished career as a journalist, activist and filmmaker, having focused primarily on the LGBTQ+ movement. He was very much aware of, and inspired by, the American Indian Movement (AIM) during its heyday in the 1970s. 'The American Indian Movement was in my childhood, a very significant force, drove a lot of news coverage and animated a lot of people's interest in justice,' France tells Deadline. 'I saw it as a natural outgrowth of the kind of political activism that I've covered from the queer perspective, to see where those parallels were.'
Short Bull, a member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe, grew up in South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Reservation. Over the past decade, he's been active in his community, helping to provide support for Native college students and participating in filmmaking workshops. How did the two filmmakers complement each other? 'My philosophy is, How can I best serve the story?' he says. 'David had a pretty extensive background with Leonard's story, and I didn't have anywhere near that level of understanding of some of the events. However, I'm from Pine Ridge. I live here, in southwestern South Dakota. I'm active within my tribe. I'm really rooted here in the community. Once I started to familiarize myself with Leonard's story, then it became whatever we can do to make it the most effective that we can. I became a servant to the story, in that sense.'
The story of AIM, Peltier and the conflicts at Pine Ridge have been the subject of several documentaries over the past few decades, including Michael Apted's Incident at Oglala (1993) and Stanley Nelson and Julianna Brannum''s Wounded Knee (2009). Much has come to light in the decades since those films, including, most recently, a letter from U.S. Attorney James H. Reynolds that sharply criticized Peltier's trial and how federal authorities handled the case. 'We wanted to use the advantage of having hindsight, to be able to tell the full story,' says France. 'We wanted to ask the question, Why did this happen? As far as our division of labor went, Jesse really led the research initiative to try to get to those answers. Jesse brought all of that to the interviewing; I was more involved in the shaping of the archive.'
In a 2024 interview with Julianna Brannum in the Oklahoma-based publication Luxiere, Brannum points out that in making Wounded Knee, Nelson had admitted that he didn't know much about Native history but as an African American, 'he knew about generational trauma, and he understood that there are differences in trauma and how it affects different people.'
For France, generational trauma figured largely in joining the Free Leonard Peltier project. 'At one of our meetings, I realized that all of us who were principally involved were either Native or queer or both,' France recalls. 'We all brought a tremendous history of personal trauma to all of these questions that we were taking on. That united us in our dedicated pursuit of truth in this story. What we all shared was the experience of having things go remarkably badly based on prejudice in our personal lives, in our collective communities. It wasn't hard for us to see where that happened in the story of Leonard Peltier, where he was carrying the weight of punishment that the federal government wanted to burden the entire movement with.'
In the process of interviewing the witnesses, survivors and elders, Short Bull deployed a style rooted more in the Lakota culture of storytelling than in common journalistic practice. 'What was ingrained in me being around Pine Ridge was how you communicate with people. Essentially, every word that you speak should be viewed like a prayer. So you have to be really careful about what you say and how you talk to people that are older than you.
'In this process of filmmaking, it's a delicate balance,' Short Bull continues. 'You want to try to get to the story, but you also have to take into account that there's a spiritual component to every action that we do. How I navigate that balance is by trying to treat everyone like I would my grandparents or my closest relative. Some of these things are so intense that how you talk about them has to be done with great care, great purpose'
For France, this protocol meant rethinking the art of interviewing, as informed by his longtime journalistic practice. 'When I first started on the project, I'd spent some time on the reservation in Pine Ridge, but [this] was my first time as a storyteller, as a journalist, and I recognized that it was a world that was very different from the one I come from. One of our producers suggested that we begin our process with a prayer for the production. We reached out to a spiritual leader, who gathered us together and offered a prayer for us, but it was also a kind of a master class in how we had to go about our research on this project. The key thing that he said to me was, 'Don't ask for anything; wait for it to come.' He also said something that they tell us in journalism school: Leave yourself behind.
'I attempt to practice what I sometimes call 'radical empathy' in my journalism,' France continues. 'It's an effort to really remove my own perspective and point of view in order to try and feel what the person feels, whose story I'm telling, or what their community feels. I knew it was going to be difficult for me in this story. Just watching Jesse's remarkable interviewing patterns and how deep he was able to penetrate the story, without really asking for the story. And often, Jesse would keep his eyes closed through the interview, and didn't ask follow-up questions.'
Speaking of interviews, journalist Kevin McKiernan, who covered the Pine Ridge episode and its aftermath, spoke to Peltier in 1990, and that conversation serves as a narrative throughline for the film. Short Bull and France used other audio sources, such as phone conversations friends and family had surreptitiously recorded. Thanks to AI technology, the filmmakers enhanced the quality of all of the recordings.
'We were able to take the vocal data set from that interview that Kevin did and use Leonard's voice to re-voice Leonard's voice, and put it all into this kind of singular vocal environment to make it seem as though it were a master interview that drove the entire thing,' France explains. 'And there was a small part where we used his writings to address an area that he hadn't covered. This was all done with his permission.'
In addition to the interviews and footage, the filmmakers availed themselves of massive amounts of material compiled by both AIM and the NDN Collective, a South Dakota-based Indigenous-led activist organization.
President Biden's 11th-hour clemency culminated a positive series of circumstances: Biden had also appointed the first Native American cabinet secretary, Deb Haaland, as Secretary of the Interior, and just weeks before the U.S. presidential election, he issued a public apology for the U.S. Indian Boarding School Program, a notorious chapter of cultural erasure, forced assimilation and rampant abuse. In addition, the filmmakers and their impact team presented a work-in-progress screening of Free Leonard Peltier on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC in December that was well-attended and well-received. 'People really felt the need to do something on Leonard's case,' France maintains. 'Biden's legacy is that he has been the most pro-Indigenous president in U.S. history, and that he could really seal that with clemency for Leonard. I think that that conversation, of which we played a very small part, was really beginning to ramp up after December.'
But now, given the current administration's turbo-charged authoritarian proclivities, the team is facing significant headwinds. Nonetheless, they are fielding invitations from festivals, are in talks with prospective distributors, and as part of their impact campaign, they will take Free Leonard Peltier on a reservation tour, with significant support from the California-based San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, the film's presenting partner.
'There is hope,' Short Bull asserts. 'Back in the '70s, things got so bad. There was no justice; it was just so dangerous, but especially to a lot of the people that I know from Pine Ridge, who keep history and stories. We've seen darker days, where our people were hurting each other regularly. But a lot of positive activity grew out of that. So you can look to history to see how you can get through times where these things seem scary. If we can crawl out of that, we can get out of any situation.'
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