Back in December, during their acceptance speech for the IndieWire Honors Performance Award, Lily Gladstone sang praise for the film they considered “the absolute highlight of [their] career,” “the best work I feel like I’ve ever done,” and on which they worked with “the greatest, most visionary, most committed director of my life.”
And then, quite cheekily, they revealed that they weren’t talking about Killers of the Flower Moon. They were talking about Erica Tremblay’s critically acclaimed Fancy Dance, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival in January of last year, and which had been frustratingly unable to come by any distributors despite the rousing critical acclaim it received.
That wait is finally over. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Apple has taken the liberty of purchasing the distribution rights of Fancy Dance, meaning it won’t be long before—in their own words—Gladstone’s actual best-ever work graces theaters and Apple TV+. (There’s no release date set yet but THR says it will be coming “later this year.”
Fancy Dance is the narrative feature debut from Tremblay, who has written on the phenomenal series Dark Winds and Reservation Dogs, and directed two episodes of the latter. The film follows Jax (Gladstone), a Seneca-Caguya woman who steps in to care for her niece Roki following the disappearance of Roki’s mother, who’s also Jax’s sister. In her spare time, Jax dedicates herself to finding her sister while helping Roki get ready for a powwow, but eventually faces the threat of losing custody of Roki to the girl’s white father. Desperate to keep her family intact, Jax takes Roki on a road trip to the Oklahoma state powwow, hoping that her sister will turn up along the way.
As profound as Killers of the Flower Moon was, there’s no denying the utmost importance of making Indigenous-centric films by actual Indigenous creators as visible and accessible as possible, so the fact that Fancy Dance will finally be finding the audience that it both needs and deserves is not only one to be celebrated, but one that should be reflected on as the entertainment industry and the variety of stories it tells continue to evolve.
(featured image: Confluential Films)
