While denying himself having made “a film with a message” with “Killers of the Flower Moon”, which is released on Wednesday in France, American filmmaker Martin Scorsese hopes to make people think about the way Native Americans have been treated since European colonization from America.
How Native Americans were treated in the centuries after European colonization of America”remains a wound to heal“, believes American director Martin Scorsese. This is in any case what he explained in May at Cannes, where his new film was presented Killers of the Flower Moonbased on the true story of Mollie Burkhart, played on screen by Native American actress Lily Gladstone.
A story of greed
This feature film, in theaters Wednesday October 18, is perhaps one of the director’s most political. It describes the way in which members of a Native American people, the Osage, on whose land one of the largest oil fields in the United States was discovered during the 1920s, were dispossessed.
The Osage held the exclusive exploitation rights to this windfall, which could neither be transferred nor sold, only inherited. Enough to arouse the desire of white pioneers, who then moved closer to the Osage community, marrying members of the tribe before eliminating them to inherit their possessions. And this, with very little risk of being brought to justice.
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Today like yesterday, according to the filmmaker
If the plot is set in 1920s Oklahoma, Martin Scorsese believes that the violence and crimes depicted could just as easily take place in 2023. For the American filmmaker, “The questions are the same as today. I hope that democracy will survive although it is sometimes very fractured. But the country is still young, it still suffers from its youthful wounds“, he said during the presentation of the film out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
“PMaybe by knowing our history and understanding where we are, we can make a difference and live up to what our country is supposed to be.e,” he added. “Let’s just show the story and see what happens.”
The power of cinema
While denying himself having made a “message film“, Martin Scorsese visibly still believes in the power of cinema, which counted so much for its opening to the world. “I was born into an immigrant family (of Italian origin, editor’s note) where there were no books at home. he confided again in May in Cannes. “So, my first information, I found it in the street, then in the cinemas, and the films led me to music, and to books...”
His regret about this film? If he plays with the western genre, he couldn’t achieve a scene he dreamed of: “I always imagined going to a saloon or a bar, I could have done big scenes (in those places). But it didn’t exist at the time“. The film takes place during Prohibition, in a state where the consumption of alcohol was prohibited by law.