Since the disappearance of his sister Tawi, Jax has been watching over his niece Roki in their Seneca-Cayuga community, in Oklahoma. To make ends meet, the young woman and the teenager commit various thefts. The rest of the time, they try to find the trace of Roki’s mother, who has disappeared, according to both the community police and the FBI, in charge of the case. When Jax finally discovers a lead, child protection services arrive to entrust Roki to his white grandfather. Addressing with strong emotion and conviction the theme of missing and murdered indigenous women, Fancy Dance, by Erica Tremblay, stars Lily Gladstone and Isabel DeRoy-Olson. We spoke to all three of them exclusively.
“The film is an expansion of a previous short film [Little Chief, déjà avec Lily Gladstone]born from the fact that my co-writer, Miciana Alise, and I were shocked by the number of reports of missing indigenous women that we saw on our social networks,” explains Erica Tremblay, who herself belongs to the Seneca-Cayuga nation. .
The filmmaker continues: “Rather than an investigative film or a pamphlet which would hammer home our message, we chose to make this subject the backdrop, and to really focus on the consequences experienced by the loved ones who remain behind and who suffer the repercussions of all this violence. We imagined these two women who transcend this trauma thanks to the bond they share; thanks to the love they feel for each other and for their community. »
Erica Tremblay also wanted to celebrate, through Jax’s homosexuality, her “queer heroines” who had contributed to the preservation of her culture.
“How many films about Indigenous women, about a teenager and her queer aunt, have we seen? None. Well, there is one,” says the director, delighted.
A stakeholder in the project from its conception, Lily Gladstone, who plays Jax, shot Fancy Dance just after Killers of the Flower Moon (The American note), by Martin Scorsese, which earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress.
“ Killers of the Flower Moon gave audiences the opportunity to fall in love with Native women in a way that has rarely — if perhaps never — been seen in Hollywood, says Lily Gladstone. And I feel like audiences, who have been interested in my character, Molly, her sisters and her community, are hungry for more stories featuring us. You know, Killers of the Flower Moon And Fancy Dancethey are two different communities, but it is the same territory, the same land…”
Above all, it’s basically the same story, dixit the actress, who specifies:
“Nothing has really changed since contact, since colonialism, in terms of this epidemic of disappearances and assassinations. Killers of the Flower Moon details past events that are an extension of this outbreak, while Fancy Dance shows how this continues today. I am grateful that Apple, given the enthusiasm generated by Killers of the Flower Moonjumped on Fancy Dance and decided to present it side by side on its platform, where lots of people will see it. It really creates a space that encourages the emergence of indigenous talent, and where we can fall in love with these beautiful women, these beautiful indigenous women. »
Ode to matriarchy
Aside from the theme of missing and murdered indigenous women, Fancy Dance explores, as we will have understood, the theme of colonialism, as well as that of the legacy of ancestral traditions.
This, through the dance of the title, practiced during powwows like the one for which Roki is preparing. Roki who hopes to be able to dance there with his mother… In this regard, there is a key scene where Roki corrects his grandfather’s new partner, white like the latter, when the latter describes as a “costume” the clothes that the teenage girl is being made.
“In this scene, Roki is the younger of the two, but she nonetheless has this ability to defend her positions in a respectful, but very firm and very direct way. I think she learned that from Jax and Tawi, and from all the women in her community,” notes Roki’s interpreter, Isabel DeRoy-Olson.
In this case, matriarchy is another of the themes discussed Fancy Dance. Note: this part of the film began to take shape when Erica Tremblay decided to relearn the Cayuga language, which only around twenty people now speak fluently.
“There are no more young people capable of speaking Cayuga. We lost the last speaker in our community in 1989. When I embarked on this immersion program to relearn Cayuga, I discovered this beautiful matriarchy, and I witnessed this beautiful relationship between women. In the Cayuga language, if you don’t know the gender of a person, it’s a “she”. If you’re talking about a group of mixed people, they’re all “they”: the opposite of English. You can learn a lot about a culture by the way it communicates in its language. In the United States and Canada, there have been active attempts to eradicate indigenous languages through various means, such as removing children from their families by placing them in residential schools, and beating them when they spoke their language…”
This is how Erica Tremblay wanted to “remember”…
“Yes, to remind myself that there were different ways of life before colonization; that barely 500 years ago, which is not a long time on the scale of human existence, communities and cultures like mine existed on this earth. »
The power of art
Hence the filmmaker’s decision to present the characters in her film switching from English to Cayuga, even if, in fact, language revitalization programs have not yet achieved this result.
With the help of a language coach, Lily Gladstone and Isabel DeRoy-Olson learned their lines in Cayuga: during a private screening, community elders congratulated them on their work.
In this case, this bias constituted an additional attraction for Lily Gladstone, since it was directly in line with her own way of approaching creation.
“In real life, you wouldn’t see a woman my age and a girl Isabel’s age speaking fluently in Cayuga. But that didn’t stop Erica from creating a world where it exists. She did it for the few people who still speak the language fluently, and for those who are learning it, because they deserve to see this world on screen. This is one of the great things that art allows us, and this is what motivated me very early on, as a performer. I was hugely influenced by Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. One aspect of his thinking is that a simulated, invented environment can have tangible repercussions on the real world, on society…”
After a brief silence, Lily Gladstone concludes:
“In other words, we can imagine on stage or in the cinema, the world not as it is, but as we would like it to be. This is what Erica did. »
The film Fancy Dance comes out on Apple TV+ on June 28.