EXCLUSIVE
FANCY DANCE Lily Gladstone embarks on a dangerous journey to seek justice in Erica Tremblay’s riveting debut.
Native people are extremely vulnerable, and violent crimes committed against them often go uninvestigated,’ says writer-director Erica Tremblay. ‘There’s not a day goes by that I don’t log onto social media and see missing posters. If you look at the statistics… most crimes happen in communities, right? Violence happens within the groups that you live. But 86% of violence perpetrated on Native women is done by non-Native people.’
Making her narrative feature debut with Fancy Dance after directing documentaries and episodes of Taika Waititi’s Reservation Dogs, Tremblay here uses one intimate story to examine the current crisis of missing Natives in America. The setting is the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in northeastern Oklahoma where Tremblay grew up, as Jax (Lily Gladstone), a queer 30-something subsisting on scams, and her 13-yearold niece Roki (newcomer Isabel Deroy-Olson) search for their missing sister/ mum Tawi (Hauli Gray). Their pursuit leads them through a landscape blotted by poverty, crime, drugs and racism.
‘Anywhere there are high levels of poverty there’s going to be high levels of crime,’ Tremblay points out. ‘You have to stop and ask yourself, “Is this on purpose?” Because reservations in and of themselves are created to be isolated and disenfranchised.’
But Fancy Dance moves to its own rhythms, spotlighting the dark, hardscrabble drama with moments of joy and optimism, love and resilience. Tremblay began with the image of Native women dancing at the annual pow-wow, and set out to make a ‘love story to matriarchal kinship’. So while the crime elements propel the story, she points out that people on reservations are also ‘watching TV, fighting with their moms, having sex, putting on nail polish, laughing, loving, eating…’ As for Gladstone’s magnetic presence at the centre of the film, Tremblay hopes that Killers of the Flower Moon has whetted audience appetite for both the Oscar-nominated actor and Native stories. But it’s not opportunist casting – Gladstone starred in Tremblay’s 2020 short Little Ch
