Fancy Dance

Following her sister's disappearance, Jax, a Native American hustler (Lily Gladstone) kidnaps her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) from the child's white grandparents and sets out for the state powwow in hopes of keeping what is left of their family intact. The pair hit the road and scour the backcountry to track down Roki’s mother. What begins as a search gradually turns into a far deeper investigation into the complexities and contradictions of how Indigenous women at the mercy of a failed justice system move through a colonized world. An urgent drama grounded in its observant depiction of reservation life, Fancy Dance establishes director/co-writer Erica Tremblay as a filmmaking talent to watch. It premiered at Sundance, where Harper's Bazaar named it one of the festival's "must-see films," calling it a "resolute, heart-wrenching and ultimately affectionate" film that "wisely reaches truths both historical and contemporary through a present-day study of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) epidemic."