Indigenous filmmakers struggle to break into Hollywood as Killers of the Flower Moon heads into Oscar season

Erica Tremblay’s first feature Fantasy dance I enjoyed a serendipitous journey to the end: I worked on the script at the prestigious Sundance Development Labs; She gathered financiers to finance the project. It stars Lily Gladstone, who now stars in Martin Scorsese’s film Moonflower Killers. Tremblay, a member of the Seneca-Cayuga nation, watched the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival’s largest theater on a Friday night last January and read the rave reviews that followed.

But after a year, Fantasy dance Still waiting for a distributor to take it to theaters. “We’ve had people say, ‘We love this movie.’ We really love you, Erica. ‘We want to know how to work with you, but it’s not right for us at this time,'” Tremblay said. “There’s a lot going on in the independent film market at this time.” Present. “There was a lot of upheaval, but it was very strange to start from, ‘Okay, we’ve done everything we’ve been given to do to create a successful independent film, and now what do you do when there’s no way out?’

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Tremblay’s experience reflects Hollywood’s continued exclusion of Indigenous talent. Films are produced for or by Indigenous people, but major distributors do not buy these titles, and as a result, the films do not get access to theaters or streaming, or the marketing or support that other films in this budget range can earn, limiting their income. Film Maker. Ability to repay their investors or move on to larger budgets and projects.

While searching for a distributor, Tremblay said she received an unusually clear request. “We had a studio that had no interest in acquiring the film, but wanted to screen the film internally for diversity training,” she said. For Tremblay, the question added another insult to Hollywood’s history of injuries. “So, you see the value in this movie, and you realize that it’s entertaining, and that it’s important for us to have these conversations, but basically we’re being relegated to the banner of diversity, and that’s not where we work.”

A number of recent studies on diversity in Hollywood have documented the erasure of Indigenous communities from both big and small screens. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that Native Americans represented less than 0.25% of on-screen speaking characters in a study of the top 100 films of the past 16 years. UCLA’s latest Hollywood Diversity Report found that no Indigenous actors played lead characters in 2022 theatrical or streaming film releases. While the streaming space tends to be more diverse in representation, it also fails to In making room for indigenous representatives.

Ana Cristina Ramon, one of the authors of the UCLA report, said progress had been minimal and that Hollywood’s erasure and relegation of Indigenous characters to the past had done real damage to the world. “The perception that Indigenous people don’t exist nowadays really impacts the way people think about Indigenous issues,” she said. “They think there aren’t that many indigenous people, or are they living now? I remember a poll several years ago that asked the general public about indigenous people, and 40% of them didn’t think they existed anymore in the United States.

As awards season heats up, many films are vying for their share of the Oscars, including… Moonflower Killers. Based on David Grann’s book of the same name, Moonflower Killers It recounts the horrors of the Osage Indian killings in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Lily Gladstone, co-star of Tremblay Fantasy dance, is one of the industry favorites for the acting Oscars, alongside Scorsese stars Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. While the film received critical acclaim, Oklahoman Found the original viewers reaction to Moonflower Killers She ranged from pride in working on the film to disappointment and disgust, describing the experience of watching the film’s depiction of violence against the Osage as akin to “hellfire.”

For Tremblay, Moonflower KillersIts production and marketing budget represents “the kind of opportunities that few Indigenous filmmakers have access to.” Tremblay said she made some modest offers of her own Fantasy dance, but it does not cover the investments of its funders or provide a way for streaming platforms. “I want this film to be available in indigenous communities. I want this film to be available in non-indigenous communities in Central America,” she said. “I think films like this are great commercial endeavors. As a first-time director, I have no impression that my film is in any way comparable to a Martin Scorsese film, but when we become almost invisible, that contrast is so vast and this gap is so wide that it makes us invisible. It’s hard to accept that the only version of this conversation is the one created by non-Indigenous filmmakers.

Progress is not impossible, as UCLA’s Ramon cites recent strides in broadcasting to boost representation on screen. “Behind the camera, (parity) is really lagging behind, especially for groups like Indigenous people,” she added. “The only way you’re going to see change is when you have more executives, more filmmakers, writers, show creators who come from different backgrounds” who can greenlight shows, she said.

“When that huge budget was allocated to Moonflower Killers“I don’t think these executives were sitting down and saying, ‘We’re going to make a billion dollars from this,'” Tremblay said. “They were investing in this for probably a lot of reasons. It’s Martin Scorsese. It’s going to win a lot of awards. We have A-list actors in it. This is an investment, and they’re taking a calculated risk in how they approach those business decisions. We need that same mentality on a scale.” Much smaller so that the gatekeepers can make those calculated assessments and those calculated risks on the original storytellers as well. Right now, I don’t have a way to connect my film to an audience that says very clearly that they want to see the film. They want more real stories. They want interesting perspectives Interesting people haven’t seen it before, and I firmly believe that there is a world in which both films should and can exist.

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