Killers of the Flower Moon, a universal story of “clash of cultures”

(New York) The film Killers of the Flower Moonpresented in preview Wednesday evening in New York, and which recounts the murders of Native Americans 100 years ago in the United States, is a “thousand-year-old” and universal story of “a clash of cultures”, declared to the AFP world cinema legend Martin Scorsese.

During an evening on the red carpet at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan, the American writer David Grann, whose eponymous book was adapted by Scorsese, also told AFP that Killers of the Flower Moon denounced the “genocidal crimes” of Native Americans by white Americans at the beginning of the 20^e century.

Presented out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May, this 3h26 fresco, which cost $200 million, starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, will be released in North American theaters on October 20, before being available on the Apple TV+ platform.

Oil-rich Osage tribe

Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true story of murders and disappearances, in the early 1920s, of members of the Osage tribe made extremely wealthy by oil on their lands in Oklahoma, in the central United States.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a man in love with a Native American woman (actress Lily Gladstone), who finds himself drawn into a plot hatched by cattle magnate William Hale, played by oil-hungry De Niro. An FBI agent, played by Jesse Plemons, is tasked with solving the murders.

“It is a clash of cultures, a mutual incomprehension, the feeling that everything is due,” Martin Scorsese commented to AFP.

But the 80-year-old New York megastar of Italian origin, who defines himself as “Euro-American”, believes that “the Americans there (in Oklahoma) were above all Europeans”.

Staged violence and crimes “can take place today and anywhere in the world. It’s a story that reverberates through the millennia,” analyzes Scorsese, who filmed on the prairies of Oklahoma, with around forty Osage Native Americans in the cast.

David Grann, journalist and writer for the cultural review The New Yorker, go further ; for him, his 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon (The American note in French) and Scorsese’s film tell “the story of one of the most monstrous crimes and racial injustices perpetrated by white settlers against Native Americans for oil money.”

When “the lure of profit mixes with the dehumanization of another people, it leads to these genocidal crimes,” criticizes the intellectual.

Grann also believes that the dramatic history and plight of the Osage tribe, and many Native Americans in the United States, have been “largely erased from (the) collective consciousness” of America.

“This was not taught in any of my school textbooks, I never learned it,” laments Mr. Grann.

Alongside him on the red carpet, the principal chief of the Osage nation, Geoffrey Standing Bear, also denounces the fact that “the Osage people but also the “native” peoples have had a very hard life for 500 years”.

“And this film shows us that this continues,” breathes the Native American leader.

The United States officially has 6.8 million “native” or “indigenous” Americans – 2% of the population – and the multicultural country is scheduled to celebrate National Indigenous Peoples Day on October 10, a holiday declared in 2021 by the Democratic President Joe Biden.