Erica Tremblay (Seneca-Cayuga) has made an impact with documentary and short film works (Little Chief from 2020’s Sundance Film Festival; In the Turn, about a trans girl’s empowerment via roller derby), and more recently has directed episodes of Native series Dark Winds and the award-winning Reservation Dogs. Lily Gladstone, meanwhile, has been a top acting talent since her breakout in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, and stars in the highly awaited, possibly-Cannes-premiering Martin Scorsese feature, Killers of the Flower Moon.

The pair have already collaborated on Little Chief, and come together again in Tremblay’s debut feature Fancy Dance, the script of which was part of the inaugural Indigenous List from the prestigious Black List. In January, we picked Tremblay’s debut (which she directed, produced and co-wrote) as one to watch at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and this month the Oklahoma-made film continues its festival run at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Fancy Dance is another acting high for Gladstone in her role of Jax, and it’s a shining feature film beginning for new talent Isabel Deroy-Olsen, who plays Gladstone’s niece Roki. There are also a number of wonderful cameos from veteran Natives, including Tamara Podemski and Reservation Dogs screenwriter Ryan RedCorn.

Let’s begin: what was your inspiration behind Fancy Dance?
The inspiration for Fancy Dance really came about while I was in a three-year-long language immersion program. I had moved up to the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada, and was studying Cayuga eight hours a day with seven other folks in my language cohort. We lost our last fluent speaker of the Cayuga [language] in my community in 1989, so there are estimated to be less than twenty first-language Cayuga speakers left on the planet. As I was learning the language with my fellow students, we were learning family words: the word for mother is knó:haˀ and the word for your aunt is knohá:ˀah, which means small mother or your other mother.

It was in that moment that my brain broke open to a whole new understanding and a whole new purview into my culture that I had not had access to prior, to really looking at the language and seeing the matrilineal language patterns, the matriarchy shining so brightly in our syntax, in our vocabulary, in our grammar. I really wanted to imagine a modern-day story where young people spoke the language fluently, and where women and queer folks were the cornerstone of keeping everyone safe. So that was the inspiration, and we embarked then on trying to make that happen.

How did Lily Gladstone come to be involved and have the lead role of Jax?
Lily Gladstone was the lead in my short film, Little Chief, and we had such a great connection and just a great time working on that project that before Fancy Dance was even really an idea, I said to her, “I want to write a feature for you. I have this idea of this aunt and niece,” and she was like, “Whatever you want to do, let’s do it.” So, she was attached to play Jax from the very infancy of Fancy Dance.

We would send Lily drafts of the script along the way. There was just an open trust between the two of us that if we arrived at something that we both felt excited about doing, that we knew we would have the passion not only to reunite and work with each other again, but to raise the resources that it takes to create a feature film and bring together the Indigenous crew and the Oklahoma crew that worked on the film. So, Lily has always been Jax, and there was never going to be anyone else to play Jax

I really loved your film. A real challenge you would’ve faced is that it deals with some quite bleak issues, the missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW), criminal activity, foster care, even prostitution. How did you work within the scriptwriting process to balance that against what I see as quite the joyful elements of the story, which is really about living your true, Native self?
Oh, I love that way you put that, living your true, Native self. Miciana Alise, who’s my co-writer, who’s also a Native woman, we both really understood from the beginning that what we wanted was to celebrate the women who are living in Native communities and fighting to keep their families together, fighting to keep children and other Native folks safe.

So obviously, as Native people, we deal with these topics and we witness them and experience them as a community. We understood that these more bleak themes would be in the background, because that’s how it feels day in, day out, living in America and living in the US, and for Indigenous populations around the world that have been colonized. But what we wanted to do was have those be burning in the background, and really focus in primarily on the relationship between Jax and Roki and how their love for each other and how their love for their mother/sister was the cornerstone of everything that they did.

So while they’re traversing this somewhat bleak topography, what’s pushing them forward and what is grounding them is their humanity for each other. We wanted to communicate that humanity to audiences—and it was tough on set, we knew we were dealing with some dark subject matter and we took time for each other. Sometimes, people would need to go take a break. I don’t think there was a day that didn’t go by that I didn’t cry on set. We were all in it together, but at the same time, there was just as much laughter and just as much celebration for what we were doing with each other. In the end, the film really culminates in a moment of pure connection and joy. We understand that the corrupt wheels of justice will continue to turn, but at least we are left with a sense of connection and love and joy.

So that’s what we really wanted to do. We knew early on we would never show a body, we would never talk about the details of how a Native woman was murdered. We would leave that in the background, in the periphery, and we would focus on these two beautiful women loving each other.

That’s beautiful.
I also want to touch a little bit on the sex work aspect of the film. As a former sex worker myself, one of the things that I wanted to do in this film was bring a sense of humanity to sex work. Just because Tawi [Roki’s mother] worked as a stripper at the strip club, made her no less a good mother. It didn’t mean she didn’t love her child, didn’t love her sister, and didn’t deserve to continue living life. So for us, we wanted to showcase sex workers as human beings, which often does not happen in film and television. We wanted to show that sex workers were valuable and that they were a part of our thriving community, and just as much energy should be spent searching for them as anyone else that goes missing.

That was a pretty fierce cameo! You’ve talked about Native languages, so the film is in your Native language?
Yes. Much of the dialogue is in Cayuga, which is my Native language.

You’re presenting a world where there’s a level of fluency and there’s just people casually speaking it, when actually it’s an endangered language.
Yes. I mean, it’s considered nearly extinct.

Well, I just want to say that that is an incredibly powerful thing to do. Sometimes, you want films to imagine a world as it could be. There are bleak aspects in your film that shows the world as it is, but to actually have the language in your film, to have audiences out there hearing that language spoken on screen, it’s so powerful. Let’s talk about your hopes for Natives in this industry. What is your biggest wish in 2023 for the film industry?
The film industry loves to talk. They love to say, “Oh, we want to support diverse stories. Oh, we want to support queer filmmakers. We want to support women filmmakers. We want to support people of color and Indigenous filmmakers.” They create all of these really bizarre programs that don’t do much to really catapult artists as opposed to just writing checks.

My biggest wish for 2023 is that studios, financiers, investors and production companies start writing those folks checks. We need support in the way of financing in order for these stories to get told, not just scriptwriting incubators, not just calls on Zoom with other directors. Those are wonderful and those are great, but we’re past the point of needing mentorship and at this point, we really just need people to start giving us the money to make our projects.

That’s so amazing because, actually, I spoke with Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, who also has a film in Sundance [Twice Colonized] and she talked about how there’s kind of this moment that has arrived for Indigenous cinema. Specifically, she was talking to Danis Goulet, who made Night Raiders, and she was saying, “We’ve got this Native moment, but how can it become real?” So thank you for that really tangible statement. Okay, a final, offbeat question. What’s the next film, other than your own one, that we should add to our Letterboxd watch list?
I just watched this beautiful film, Aftersun. It came out last year and it really, really moved me and touched me in a lot of ways. I think that that’s really great. And then I know that there’s a film that I’m dying to see made by Billy Luther that’s going to be premiering at SXSW, and so I’m excited to see his film as well: Frybread, Face and Me.

Erica, such a wonderful privilege to talk with you this morning. You have a great day, and hope you get a chance to catch your breath and have a nice cup of coffee.
Thank you so much.