You would have been hard-pressed to find a timelier film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival than “Free Leonard Peltier,” directors Jesse Short Bull and David France’s documentary about the Native American activist who spent nearly 50 years in prison for the murder of two federal agents, a crime he insists he didn’t commit.
Just days ahead of the film’s Park City premiere, Peltier received clemency from President Joe Biden in one of his last acts before leaving office, sending the filmmakers back to the cutting room to hurriedly incorporate new material into their documentary.
“The announcement came from the White House with 14 minutes left to Biden’s presidency,” says France. “We were watching on our cell phones. The [Trump] inauguration had already begun. Biden was already in the room. The speeches and songs were taking place. And then the word came.”
“Free Leonard Peltier,” which plays this week in the international competition at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, is a decades-spanning portrait of an activist who, as a leading member of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, fought to expose the injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government against Native American communities. Described by Variety’s Joe Leydon as a “persuasively well-researched and often infuriating documentary” that delivers a “potent history lesson,” it is an attempt, says France, to “bring [Peltier’s story] to a whole new generation.”
Indeed, this isn’t the first time that the Native American activist has made it to the big screen: Both “Thunderheart,” the 1992 drama directed by Michael Apted loosely based on the events that landed Peltier behind bars, and Apted’s acclaimed documentary “Incident at Oglala,” narrated by Robert Redford and released that same year, would have familiarized earlier audiences with the facts of his controversial case.
On June 26, 1975, armed FBI agents entered the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, leading to a shootout that left two FBI agents, Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams, and the activist Joe Stuntz dead. Prosecutors said the agents were shot at point-blank range by Peltier; his attorneys and supporters insist he did not pull the trigger and was instead framed by the government, the victim of a rigged trial that the Academy Award nominee France (“How to Survive a Plague”) characterizes as “a true tragedy and miscarriage of justice.”
While “Free Leonard Peltier” uses interviews, archival footage and A.I.-generated reenactments to recreate the events that transpired that day at Wounded Knee, the film also situates Peltier’s trial and plight within the broader context of crimes against America’s Indigenous communities, including a bloody 1890 massacre on the same site in which some 300 Lakota men, women and children were killed by federal troops. Two years before the shootout that landed Peltier in prison, hundreds of Native American activists — led by members of AIM — seized Wounded Knee, leading to a monthslong occupation. Speaking to Variety on the anniversary of the standoff, Short Bull refers to it as “Liberation Day.”
A member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe in South Dakota, Short Bull, who with Laura Tomaselli co-directed the documentary “Lakota Nation vs. United States,” which catalogues decades’ worth of efforts by the government to encroach upon and illegally seize Indigenous land, grew up around 50 miles from Pine Ridge. He says it was Peltier and his peers who did the important work of helping him understand and appreciate his Lakota identity, keeping alive beliefs and traditions that were in danger of dying out.
“Leonard’s generation was the generation that started to understand what was lost through the period of assimilation. And that generation was pining to cling to what was still intact,” he says. “I’m grateful for Leonard’s generation and the sacrifices that they had to make.”
While there have been “major strides” to right some of the historical wrongs perpetrated by the government against Indigenous populations, “there are still the fair share of challenges that are still quite prevalent,” says Short Bull. “And that’s the thing that frustrates me. I see other Leonards. Because we fight for the land, because we fight for our culture, there’s going to be other Leonards.”
Peltier himself was released from a federal prison in Central Florida on Feb. 18. The 80-year-old, who is in poor health and partially blind, will serve the remainder of his two life sentences in home confinement in North Dakota. Nevertheless, the directors say, his work is far from done.
“The power for change and safety and love for our community is still at the very forefront of his mind,” says Short Bull. “He’s still going, and he still wants to be active.”
“His fire is undiminished,” adds France. “And that’s been remarkable: how you can be treated as poorly as he was and deprived of just about everything as he was for 49 years, and to not lose his warrior spirit.”
The Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival takes place March 6 – 16.
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