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Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘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. More from Deadline Sundance To Unveil Doc On Paul Reubens/Pee-Wee Herman, Exploring Actor's Life And Sexuality, Plus Films On Selena, Marlee Matlin, 'Zodiac Killer Project' & More Thessaloniki Film Festival Head On This Year's Edition & How Climate Change And Rising Political Extremism Have Made It Harder To Mount Film Events Scene 2 Seen Podcast: Filmmakers Jesse Short Bull And Laura Tomaselli Discuss Their Documentary 'Lakota Nation Vs. The United States' And The Ongoing Battle For Sacred Land Between The Two 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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The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘He's going home': new film documents the fight to free Leonard Peltier
Of all the documentaries at the Sundance film festival this year, perhaps none is as timely as Free Leonard Peltier, Jesse Short Bull and David France's film on the Indigenous activist imprisoned for nearly half a century. Peltier, now 80 years old, is serving consecutive life sentences for the killing of two FBI agents during a shootout at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975, though he has maintained his innocence. Activists, celebrities and liberation advocates such as Nelson Mandela have called for his release for decades, citing railroaded justice and evidence of prosecutorial misconduct; the FBI and law enforcement, meanwhile, have campaigned vociferously against any commutation of his sentence. Short Bull (Lakota Nation vs the United States) and France began working on the documentary after Peltier had already served 45 years, as a new generation of activists worked to free the longest-serving political prisoner in the US. 'If you're Native American in the United States, you know the story of Leonard Peltier,' says activist Holly Cook Macarro (Red Lake Nation) at the film's outset. The 110-minute documentary underscores Peltier's status as an icon of Native American independence and resistance, connected to more than half a century of Indigenous activism in the US, from the civil rights organizing of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1960s, to the protests at Standing Rock in 2016, to the recent lobbying to free him. Peltier 'fought for many of these things we're direct beneficiaries of – cultural resurgence, Native American Freedom of Religion Act, Indian Self-Determination Act,' says Nick Tilsen (Oglala Lakota), founder of Indigenous-led civil rights group NDN Collective in the film. 'It's just been a part of the lexicon of being in the movement.' It seemed that the arc of the film would not end in change – Free Leonard Peltier captures some of a July 2024 hearing in which Peltier was once again denied parole; the original finished version of the project ended with a clip from a 40-year-old interview with Peltier, who hasn't been allowed to speak publicly since the 1990s, hoping that he would one day be released. But on 20 January, with 14 minutes remaining in his presidential term, Joe Biden commuted his sentence, allowing Peltier to serve the remainder of his time in home confinement – and sending the documentary team scrambling to the edit room with a week until their premiere. The film now concludes with a highly emotional note of triumph, as activists hug and sob outside the federal correctional complex in Coleman, Florida. Notably, the commutation does not admit wrongdoing on behalf of the state. It will enable Peltier, who suffers from numerous health ailments, to 'spend his remaining days in home confinement but will not pardon him for his underlying crimes', according to a White House statement. The film outlines why, weaving a narrative of generational activism and miscarried justice that frames the shootout at Pine Ridge not as blow-for-blow escalation, as it was portrayed by mainstream media at the time, but as government incursion on to Indigenous land. Several elders of AIM, founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, appear in the documentary, attesting to the injustice of Peltier's incarceration as well as the movement's intentions. Forged by the civil rights protests of the 1960s, AIM targeted the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for its destruction of culture and identity through oppression and forced assimilation. 'Trying to be an Indian is a daily struggle itself,' said Peltier in the 40-year-old interview excerpted in the film. 'AIM was fighting back, all over the country. We were all living under the same type of oppression.' Peltier helped manage a weeklong occupation of the BIA office in 1972, as part of an effort to address the 'Trail of Broken Treaties', calling for the restoration of the treaty-making process, the legal recognition of existing treaties and the return of 110m acres of land, among other demands. At Pine Ridge, Peltier was defending against what many Native Americans saw as further theft of their land; the film suggests that the FBI was spying on residents and knew that AIM was shifting its focus toward mining practices in the area. The day of the shootout, Dick Wilson, the controversial tribal chairman with a private police force and ties to the federal government, signed away one-eighth of the reservation's land. The shootout killed the FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, as well as a Native American, Joe Stuntz. No action was taken over Stuntz's death. Three Indigenous activists – Peltier, Robert Robideau and Dino Butler – were prosecuted for the agents' deaths. Robideau and Butler were acquitted on the basis of self-defense. But Peltier was convicted, based on prosecution tactics that are 'enough to make the authorities hang their head in shame', says James Reynolds, a former US attorney who handled the prosecution and has since called for Peltier's release, in the film. No one disputes that Peltier was shooting that day. The FBI has maintained the shootout represented a brazen attack on its agents, and that Peltier shot the agents execution style. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, personally advocated against Peltier's parole in July 2024, calling him a 'remorseless killer who brutally murdered two of our own'. Peltier says he was nowhere near the agents and is being made a scapegoat. He has maintained his innocence, and refused to confess even though it would have helped his efforts at parole. 'People know where my heart's at. I'm not a cold-blooded killer,' he says in the film. Peltier's imprisonment, perceived as injustice at the hands of a callous US government, continues to serve as a metaphor for many Native Americans. 'Everything that's happened to him is really a mirror for everything that's happened to Indian people throughout history,' says Tilsen in the film. Peltier is not yet out of prison; he will be released 30 days after the commutation, on 18 February, at which point he should return to a new home at the Turtle Mountain Indian reservation in North Dakota. His life remains in danger, according to advocates. But the film ends on a note of hard-earned hope – 'we got through!' says Cook Macarro through tears. 'He's going home.' Free Leonard Peltier is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
