It’s an elusive dream for thus many docmakers: to affect laws, to search out justice, to make a distinction. To vary the world. With Free Leonard Peltier, filmmakers Jesse Brief Bull (Lakota Nation vs. United States) and David France (How To Survive a Plague) achieved their eponymous purpose: Seven days earlier than the world premiere of their movie on the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant in January, President Joe Biden, in his final act earlier than leaving workplace, issued a clemency order, commuting Peltier’s sentence to dwelling confinement.
The Native American activist had served practically 50 years in a federal jail, having been convicted of homicide of two FBI brokers in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. Peltier’s attorneys and supporters would wage a decades-long battle by way of appeals, writs and petitions to circuit courts, federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court docket and three U.S. presidents, alleging quite a few incidents of misconduct by the FBI in Peltier’s case. His trigger grew to become a world trigger célèbre, attracting the help of Nobel Laureates, students, artists, and civil rights leaders.
‘Free Leonard Peltier’
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The Free Leonard Peltier group rushed again to the modifying room so as to add this joyful ending, working at a feverish tempo to craft a brand new DCP for the January twenty seventh premiere. Peltier was launched on February 18 from a federal correctional facility in Florida to dwelling confinement on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. The movie screens Wednesday on the Thessaloniki Worldwide Documentary Pageant after celebrating its worldwide premiere at TiDF Tuesday evening.
Whereas Jesse Brief Bull and David France hadn’t labored collectively earlier than, they each got here to the undertaking with an extended historical past of activism–and a deep admiration for Peltier and his iconic stature. France was within the viewers at a 2022 screening of Brief Bull’s earlier movie, Lakota Nation vs. United States. Brief Bull’s producers, Jody Archambault, Jane Myers and Chicken Runningwater, made the introduction between the filmmakers.
PARK CITY, UTAH – JANUARY 27: (L-R) David France, Jesse Brief Bull, Amber Morning Star Byars, Jhane Myers and Jodi Archambau attend the ‘Free Leonard Peltier’ premiere at Sundance
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France has had a distinguished profession as a journalist, activist and filmmaker, having centered totally on the LGBTQ+ motion. He was very a lot conscious of, and impressed by, the American Indian Motion (AIM) throughout its heyday within the Seventies. “The American Indian Motion was in my childhood, a really vital power, drove plenty of information protection and animated lots of people’s curiosity in justice,” France tells Deadline. “I noticed it as a pure outgrowth of the form of political activism that I’ve coated from the queer perspective, to see the place these parallels had been.”
Brief Bull, a member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe, grew up in South Dakota, close to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Over the previous decade, he’s been energetic in his group, serving to to offer help for Native school college students and taking part in filmmaking workshops. How did the 2 filmmakers complement one another? “My philosophy is, How can I greatest serve the story?” he says. “David had a reasonably intensive background with Leonard’s story, and I didn’t have wherever close to that stage of understanding of a number of the occasions. Nonetheless, I’m from Pine Ridge. I dwell right here, in southwestern South Dakota. I’m energetic inside my tribe. I’m actually rooted right here in the neighborhood. As soon as I began to familiarize myself with Leonard’s story, then it grew to become no matter we will do to make it the best that we will. I grew to become a servant to the story, in that sense.”
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The story of AIM, Peltier and the conflicts at Pine Ridge have been the topic of a number of documentaries over the previous few a long time, together with Michael Apted’s Incident at Oglala (1993) and Stanley Nelson and Julianna Brannum’’s Wounded Knee (2009). A lot has come to mild within the a long time since these movies, together with, most not too long ago, a letter from U.S. Lawyer James H. Reynolds that sharply criticized Peltier’s trial and the way federal authorities dealt with the case. “We needed to make use of the benefit of getting hindsight, to have the ability to inform the complete story,” says France. “We needed to ask the query, Why did this occur? So far as our division of labor went, Jesse actually led the analysis initiative to attempt to get to these solutions. Jesse introduced all of that to the interviewing; I used to be extra concerned within the shaping of the archive.”
In a 2024 interview with Julianna Brannum within the Oklahoma-based publication Luxiere, Brannum factors out that in making Wounded Knee, Nelson had admitted that he didn’t know a lot about Native historical past however as an African American, “he knew about generational trauma, and he understood that there are variations in trauma and the way it impacts totally different individuals.”
For France, generational trauma figured largely in becoming a member of the Free Leonard Peltier undertaking. “At one among our conferences, I noticed that every one of us who had been principally concerned had been both Native or queer or each,” France recollects. “All of us introduced an incredible historical past of non-public trauma to all of those questions that we had been taking up. That united us in our devoted pursuit of fact on this story. What all of us shared was the expertise of getting issues go remarkably badly based mostly on prejudice in our private lives, in our collective communities. It wasn’t onerous for us to see the place that occurred within the story of Leonard Peltier, the place he was carrying the load of punishment that the federal authorities needed to burden the complete motion with.”
Within the technique of interviewing the witnesses, survivors and elders, Brief Bull deployed a mode rooted extra within the Lakota tradition of storytelling than in widespread journalistic apply. “What was ingrained in me being round Pine Ridge was the way you talk with individuals. Basically, each phrase that you simply converse needs to be seen like a prayer. So it’s a must to be actually cautious about what you say and the way you speak to individuals which might be older than you.
“On this technique of filmmaking, it’s a fragile steadiness,” Brief Bull continues. “You wish to attempt to get to the story, however you additionally must consider that there’s a religious part to each motion that we do. How I navigate that steadiness is by attempting to deal with everybody like I’d my grandparents or my closest relative. A few of these issues are so intense that the way you discuss them needs to be finished with nice care, nice goal”
For France, this protocol meant rethinking the artwork of interviewing, as knowledgeable by his longtime journalistic apply. “Once I first began on the undertaking, I’d spent a while on the reservation in Pine Ridge, however [this] was my first time as a storyteller, as a journalist, and I acknowledged that it was a world that was very totally different from the one I come from. One among our producers urged that we start our course of with a prayer for the manufacturing. We reached out to a religious chief, who gathered us collectively and provided a prayer for us, however it was additionally a form of a grasp class in how we needed to go about our analysis on this undertaking. The important thing factor that he mentioned to me was, ‘Don’t ask for something; look ahead to it to return.’ He additionally mentioned one thing that they inform us in journalism college: Go away your self behind.
“I try to apply what I generally name ‘radical empathy’ in my journalism,” France continues. “It’s an effort to actually take away my very own perspective and viewpoint to be able to try to really feel what the particular person feels, whose story I’m telling, or what their group feels. I knew it was going to be troublesome for me on this story. Simply watching Jesse’s exceptional interviewing patterns and the way deep he was in a position to penetrate the story, with out actually asking for the story. And infrequently, Jesse would hold his eyes closed by way of the interview, and didn’t ask follow-up questions.”
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Talking of interviews, journalist Kevin McKiernan, who coated the Pine Ridge episode and its aftermath, spoke to Peltier in 1990, and that dialog serves as a story throughline for the movie. Brief Bull and France used different audio sources, reminiscent of cellphone conversations family and friends had surreptitiously recorded. Due to AI expertise, the filmmakers enhanced the standard of the entire recordings.
“We had been in a position to take the vocal information set from that interview that Kevin did and use Leonard’s voice to re-voice Leonard’s voice, and put all of it into this sort of singular vocal atmosphere to make it appear as if it had been a grasp interview that drove the complete factor,” France explains. “And there was a small half the place we used his writings to handle an space that he hadn’t coated. This was all finished together with his permission.”
Along with the interviews and photographs, the filmmakers availed themselves of large quantities of fabric compiled by each AIM and the NDN Collective, a South Dakota-based Indigenous-led activist group.
President Biden’s Eleventh-hour clemency culminated a constructive collection of circumstances: Biden had additionally appointed the primary Native American cupboard secretary, Deb Haaland, as Secretary of the Inside, and simply weeks earlier than the U.S. presidential election, he issued a public apology for the U.S. Indian Boarding Faculty Program, a infamous chapter of cultural erasure, compelled assimilation and rampant abuse. As well as, the filmmakers and their affect group introduced a work-in-progress screening of Free Leonard Peltier on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC in December that was well-attended and well-received. “Folks actually felt the necessity to do one thing on Leonard’s case,” France maintains. “Biden’s legacy is that he has been probably the most pro-Indigenous president in U.S. historical past, and that he might actually seal that with clemency for Leonard. I believe that that dialog, of which we performed a really small half, was actually starting to ramp up after December.”
However now, given the present administration’s turbo-charged authoritarian proclivities, the group is dealing with vital headwinds. Nonetheless, they’re fielding invites from festivals, are in talks with potential distributors, and as a part of their affect marketing campaign, they are going to take Free Leonard Peltier on a reservation tour, with vital help from the California-based San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, the movie’s presenting accomplice.
“There may be hope,” Brief Bull asserts. “Again within the ’70s, issues obtained so dangerous. There was no justice; it was simply so harmful, however particularly to plenty of the those who I do know from Pine Ridge, who hold historical past and tales. We’ve seen darker days, the place our individuals had been hurting one another often. However plenty of constructive exercise grew out of that. So you possibly can look to historical past to see how one can get by way of occasions the place these items appear scary. If we will crawl out of that, we will get out of any state of affairs.”
