Fancy Dance
Join us for a special evening celebrating Indigenous filmmaking at Cornell Cinema.
The program will feature the premiere of “See Us, Hear Us, Know Us”, a new short film directed by Professor Jeffrey Palmer (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma), alongside a screening and Zoom discussion of Fancy Dance (2023) with writer/director Erica Tremblay (Seneca-Cayuga Nation).
“See Us, Hear Us, Know Us” is a short film directed by Jeffrey Palmer and starring Native and Indigenous students from across Cornell. This short film was commissioned by Cornell Cinema and supported by a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts.
Fancy Dance is a powerful coming-of-age story that offers nuanced account of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women epidemic. Since her sister’s disappearance, Jax (Lily Gladstone) has cared for her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) by scraping by on the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in Oklahoma. At the risk of losing custody to Jax’s father, Frank (Shea Whigham), the pair hit the road and scour the backcountry to track down Roki’s mother in time for the powwow. What begins as a search gradually turns into a far deeper investigation into the complexities and contradictions of Indigenous women moving through a colonized world and at the mercy of a failed justice system.
Writer-director Erica Tremblay will join for a Zoom conversation after the film.
Free admission! Sponsored by the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA).
The screening is presented in conjunction with the course “From the Swampy Land: Indigenous People of the Ithaca Area” (AIIS/ANTHRO/ARKEO 2720), taught by Professor Kurt A. Jordan.
Special thanks to the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP), the Indigenous Graduate Student Association (IGSA), Native American and Indigenous Students at Cornell (NAISAC), Akwe:kon, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Performing & Media Arts.
About the speakers
Erica Tremblay (Seneca-Cayuga Nation) is a writer/director studying Gayogoho:nǫ’ on Cayuga Lake. She is a Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Lab fellow and an SFFilm Rainin Grant recipient. Tremblay was the executive story editor on the AMC series Dark Winds, produced by George R.R. Martin and Robert Redford. She is an executive story editor on Reservation Dogs and has directed an episode. Together with Sterlin Harjo, she will be co-writing and executive producing a series adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Yellow Bird for Paramount+.
Jeffrey Palmer is an Associate Professor of Performing and Media Arts, a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and is an award-winning filmmaker and media artist. He describes his work as a multimedia exploration of Indigenous people's lives in twenty-first century America. He recently completed the feature film, N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear, examining the life and mind of the first and only Native American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. He is a member of the Directors Guild of America, International Documentary Association, Television Academy, and in 2022 completed the short narrative film Ghosts, which is chronicles Native American boarding schools in Oklahoma. He is currently working on the feature narrative script for his acclaimed short film Ghosts as well as a film project for the new Obama Presidential Center in the Southside of Chicago.
