Arts & Culture

Meet Augusto Góngora: Chilean journalist who reported on corruption and violence during Augusto Pinochet’s presidency, father of two and husband of Paulina Urrutia Fernández, an actress, activist and former Minister of the National Council of Culture and the Arts of Chile.

Augusto, who has Alzheimer’s disease, often can’t remember any of this.

The Eternal Memory, directed by Academy Award nominee Maite Alberdi, is a deep dive into Augusto and Paulina’s daily lives. Recent footage, much filmed at the height of the COVID pandemic, is mixed with footage of the couple’s and the country’s past. The film relates Augusto’s work writing about Chile’s cultural history that Pinochet attempted to suppress with his own memory loss.

“Without memory, we don’t know who we are,” he wrote.

That is definitely the case for Augusto, who often doesn’t recognize himself in the mirror. In the first scene, Paulina reminds Augusto of who she is and that they’ve known each other 20 years. She later explains they built their house together, helps him shave and shower, reads to him, and attempts to rekindle his memories of their past experiences. She also deals with Augusto’s erratic behavior, often late at night. We see how frustrating Augusto’s memory loss is for him, and how in-the-moment it seems when a painful memory of the past comes back. Balancing acting with caring for her husband and other responsibilities, Paulina’s frustrations come out as well. As much as The Eternal Memory is a story about the patient’s hardships, it’s about the caregiver’s struggles.

It’s also a love story. We learn how the couple met and became married, and share romantic moments with them. Love, it seems, is one thing that can trigger Augusto’s ability to recall his life.

Compelling and informative, The Eternal Memory serves as a great educational resource. Those with little exposure or knowledge of Alzheimer’s disease can see an undaunted example of the anguish it can bring. Unfortunately, it doesn’t inspire much hope for others facing the disease.

The Eternal Memory is screened in Spanish with English subtitles. It plays again on Jan. 26 at Redstone Cinemas and Jan. 27 at the Park Avenue Theatre in Park City. Visit Sundance’s website for more info.

To support research to help fight Alzheimer’s disease, join the Alzheimer’s Association Walk to End Alzheimer’s at America First Field in Sandy on Sept. 30. Registration is free, and donations can be made in any amount.

Find all our Sundance coverage from this year and year’s past. And while you’re here, subscribe and get six issues of Salt Lake magazine, your guide to the best of life in Utah

Fair Play, director Chloe Domont’s feature debut, has gotten a fair amount of talk at Sundance, recently picking up the first major distribution deal of the festival with Netflix. There’s good reason for the excitement, in part for the solid performances of its leads, Phoebe Dynevor (Emily) and Alden Ehrenreich (Luke), as well as for its timely depiction of gender politics in a high-pressure corporate environment, where dominating everyone, or trying to, acting as if you can—that is, being not just one of the boys, but the Man—is the only path to success. 

The film opens with a seemingly unexpected proposal, an offer of marriage, Luke to Emily, that plays out, strangely, like a negotiation, not for a mutually desired union, but for something more like a merger. It’s no spoiler to tell you that Emily says yes—though it does seem like there’s a chance she might not. Is it because she’s not sure about Luke? Maybe. Or rather it might be the fact that it’s a professional risk. They can’t tell anyone because revealing such an entanglement, socially sanctioned or not, would give an impression of bias, would introduce an imbalanced power dynamic, a hint of impropriety that might sink them both at the investment capital firm where they work, side by side, pretending they know nothing about each other’s personal lives. There’s a suggestion of ethics here, that the firm wants to provide a “clean floor”—in the words of its mob don-like leader, Campbell—for potential investors. But also we can read Luke and Emily’s caution as a desire to avoid revealing a potential weakness, something others might exploit. To announce their relationship (they already live together), even now, sealed by a ring, might make them prey, they worry, their jobs and their mutual future at risk should one half of the couple stumble into a costly mistake or some snare set by their conniving co-workers.

The computer-lined desks of the company will remind viewers of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Though the employees gazing into those monitors and gossiping crudely about each other are more diverse than in that 1987 classic, the nature of their dialogue and their jockeying for favor remain virtually the same. This and the fact that we still get mostly white men speaking reflects a telling lack of progress. As we learn, though, Emily has no trouble talking the talk as well as any of those men, and it’s notable that only when Campbell approaches her with his own professional proposal do we learn what a wunderkind she really is. To this point, Dynevor has performed humility as if her Emily has not yet done enough to earn notice, and so we understand her and Luke as relative equals—despite his inherent advantage as a man. But once Campbell recites Emily’s history to her, we understand the character’s modesty as her own performance, as intentional restraint, a strange move in a world that rewards loudly proclaimed, aggressive, masculine ambition. Is she trying to protect herself, Luke, both? Her late-night meeting with Campbell forces a decision that will require Emily to play her hand, in effect to become one of the boys if she wants to move forward.

In the aftermath, Emily and Luke’s relationship is strained to the point of breaking in scene after scene of more or less private shouting matches, full of wounding accusations and seeming truth telling. The emotional pitch hits its peak rather too early, so these confrontations feel almost repetitive well before we reach the last straw, in part because Ehrenreich’s Luke has made us wonder if this is really where we should have ended, in a feminist revenge tale, with Luke as Emily’s ironic antagonist. 

Fair Play seems to want us to see Emily as its sole protagonist, and perhaps hero, but, truthfully, the duo are the more interesting subject. And does Luke, as a character, not as a representative of masculine oppression, really deserve the turns the script gives him in the third act? Even in one of his worst moments (not the worst), stating in a cruel and terrible way that Emily will never be accepted as an equal among the upper echelons of power, we can’t miss that his point is an important revelation of a corruption of character Emily has not seen in herself, and that she won’t subsequently avoid. A couple of glimpses like this, of skepticism about the whole enterprise they’ve committed themselves to, is enough to make us wonder why Fair Play wants to make Luke the scapegoat for a firm and a society that may appreciate what it gains from Emily’s boldness and productivity but that will always exploit and humiliate her far worse than it would her fiancé. In the ending we have, what has Emily actually won? It’s not clear that the film really expects us to ask this question.

Rather, it seems like the more interesting story would have been to examine how both partners, trying to maintain their best intentions for each other, are compelled by circumstances they could walk away from to make difficult and self-destructive decisions over what they value more, each other or professional success in an exploitative industry. That is, while Fair Play’s interest in the injustices and violence of gender inequality is laudable, it’s missed a great opportunity to do that and also to more substantively critique a system—our system, The System—that depends on individuals and communities (colleagues, lovers, larger units of society) alienating and destroying each other for financial gain and shallow prestige.

There are moments, early on, in Infinity Pool where the score (brilliantly written by Tim Hecker) shifts into these discordant, disturbing notes while the camera pans across these beautiful locations along the beach and vacation paradise of the fictional state of Li Tolqa and your stomach turns and your skins prickles because you know something isn’t right here. 

But you don’t have to wait long to find out what’s wrong. And once things take a turn, they continue their downward spiral as you rush, breathless and dizzy to the conclusion. 

Infinity Pool follows a married couple—James and Em Foster (played by Alexander Skarsgard and Cleopatra Coleman)—as they travel to a tropical resort set inside an impoverished foreign country. James is a writer who has struggled to write a second novel after the failure of his first six years previous. He hopes this trip will reinvigorate his creativity, maybe his marriage and possibly his self. Once there, they meet another couple who come over uncomfortably strong and friendly. After spending the evening with them, they convince the Fosters to sneak out of the compound the next day and travel the countryside. Putting aside better judgment, they agree. After a day of eating and drinking (amongst other things) on the beach, they drive home in the dark.

And things go wrong. 

Without spoiling anything further in the movie, they come in contact with the justice system on the island—where things are very Old Testament. But the tourism board has implemented a policy that allows rich tourists to substitute punishment directly in favor of a by proxy punishment. And that lack of accountability and consequence spirals the movie out of control. 

Penduluming between scenic views and lush landscapes to hypnotic, colorful, drug-fueled trips at a faster and faster pace, Infinity Pool is hypnotic and unsettling. The film constantly pushes the boundaries of excess and content and sanity, while managing to walk the fine line between horror and exploitation. There were quite a few parts where I steeled myself for a turn too far that disconnected me from the movie, but they never came. In fact, each turn and twist and boundary pushed, drew me further into the movie. 

Brandon Cronenberg returns to the Sundance Film Festival after bringing 2020’s Possessor to the festival. There’s an incredible confidence and control that he brings with his directing to Infinity Pool. Everything feels precise and measured in a way that elicits brilliance instead of sterility. He moves the camera carefully through the scenes, ratcheting up anxiety and tension even in the most common of scenes. 

The cast does an incredible job but Mia Goth’s performance is a stand out. Really taking the horror world by storm with X and Pearl in the last year, Goth’s unusual look and incredible presence mesmerize you in this film. She, like the film, moves from sexy and alluring to unhinged and terrifying as time goes on. Like James Foster, we fall under her spell early on and find ourselves mired in extremity before we realize it. 

As the film progresses, characters adorn themselves in horrific masks worn by the resort’s local band. They use these masks to hide their identities as they indulge their passions and impulses—using the local customs and traditions to hide their true intentions and feel like it’s a persona they’re wearing. In the film’s most haunting visual sequence, Cronenberg plays with the idea that the masks aren’t superficial, but bone deep. That as we enforce the idea that the rich have no consequences for their actions, we create the monsters that terrorize us. 

Basically, Infinity Pool is the best season of White Lotus yet. 

And while the ultimate end of the film feels perhaps too clean and safe for the unhinged and harrowing rest of the film, it still leaves us in a place of deep dread, uncertainty and hypnotic confusion. This is the film I’ll be talking about for a long time from the festival.

Existing somewhere in a space between Waiting for Guffman and Wet Hot American Summer, Theater Camp tells the mockumentary story of a struggling summer drama camp that is on the verge of bankruptcy when its founder and director suffers a stroke and management is passed to her vlogging, alpha-bro of a son who has no connection or understanding of musicals, acting or summer camp. And what follows is a silly, heart-warming movie that succeeds on the strength and charm of its ensemble. 

When Joan (played by the ever-exuberant Amy Sedaris) suffers a stroke and ends up in a coma just before the start of a new summer at AdirondACTS, an independent and quirky theater camp, her son Troy (played by the brilliant Jimmy Tatro—go watch American Vandal on Netflix right now if you haven’t) has to step in and take over a business he has no knowledge about. Additionally, the documentary being shot about Joan has to pivot to cover the camp’s struggle to survive without its founder. Troy is a self-described “Crypto-Bro” (don’t worry, he, like us, has no idea what that means) and wannabe influencer who is always streaming from his phone to his fans. Coming to learn that the camp is in near financial ruin, he has to team up with the other counselors in one plan after another to try and save his mother’s legacy.

Theater Camp is the feature directorial debut of Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, from a script by them and Noah Galvin and Ben Platt (based on a 2020 short film of the same name), and does a good job capturing the zany feel of improvised mockumentary while still keeping the plotting and structure tight and momentum forward. Molly Gordon and Noah Galvin both made splashes in 2019’s brilliant Booksmart, while Nick Lieberman and Ben Platt have worked together on Ben’s music career. Their work behind and in front of the camera (Gordon, Platt and Galvin all have starring roles in the film) is seamless and works perfectly within the structure and approach of the film. 

No mockumentary can succeed without its cast, and Theater Camp’s strength is in its actors. Everyone comes into the film with incredible timing, charming performances and incredible chemistry. Jimmy Tatro and Noah Galvin were standouts to me with heart-warming performances and understated deliveries. No character is given a one-note role. 

And while Theater Camp is not uproariously funny, its simple approach is effective and charming. The filmmakers deftly pack a lot of heart into every character—including the menagerie of child performers—and give the film a fun, satisfying and moving finale. Everyone has their moments and arcs and the movie goes out on a high note. 

Bound to be one of the top crowd-pleasers at Sundance Film Festival this year, Theater Camp was acquired by Searchlight Pictures for $8 million from a bidding war ensured after the premiere, so everyone will be able to watch it later this year if they miss it during its Sundance times.

Actress Alice Englert’s first feature Bad Behaviour is, natch, a quintessential actor’s film. Englert wrote and directed, and also co-stars alongside Jennifer Connelly, who seems born for role of Lucy, Englert’s character Dylan’s mother. As the film opens, Lucy is on her way to a quasi-silent retreat in Oregon, presided over by the enigmatic guru Elon Bello (Ben Whishaw). Before completely losing service and her right to speak or use technology, Lucy reaches out to her somewhat estranged daughter, who’s on set in New Zealand, a stunt person in what appears to be a sci fi or fantasy flick, tasked with training a lead character on how to properly choke and pummel her. Maybe all Lucy really wants to do is let someone connected to her know where she is and that, should anyone try to contact her, she’s not dead. Or maybe she’s just, or also, testing the waters to make sure that someone who should care about her still does. Lucy is a mean person, cruel, not just because she says what’s on her mind, but because she says it with an atavistic malice. She can make the question “Do I remind you of your mommy?” feel like a threat. It is, in a way, particularly if you don’t know Lucy, if you don’t know how she’s likely to follow up on your answer.

Being a mother is a particular sore spot for Lucy. She’s been quite bad at it, as we understand from Dylan right from that first call. But it’s not necessarily that Lucy doesn’t know this, or that she doesn’t know how a mother should be. It’s perhaps more the problem that she didn’t have a very good role model, and she’s let that burn her up, though we learn little about her deep past. Rather, Bad Behaviour revels to the point of wallowing (a good wallow—uncomfortable, hilarious and penetrating) in the difficult work Lucy tries to do to untangle the seemingly irresolvable knot that’s strangled her emotional, intellectual and behavioral impulses. Is she a misanthrope? Perhaps, and maybe it’s strange to say, but her cruel victories and equally cruel failures are mesmerizing, a delight, as performed by Connelly. 

Close-ups are plentiful in the film, as are long scenes and takes, which give the actors ample time to supplement the smart and cutting dialogue with illuminating, frequently complex expression. The setting of a self-help retreat is easily satirized, but it serves here, too, as an opportunity for scripting several teeth-gratingly embarrassing and earnest acting exercises, the most extended of which is a roleplay in which one partner is supposed to act as mother to a baby before switching roles. It’s absurd when Elon describes it (he participates, too), but seeing it play out in real time, a viewer feels a bit like a participant: skepticism is overwhelming at first, but by the time the final step of saying something to your mother you wish you’d said comes along, there’s real anticipation that something important is about to be revealed. Maybe this is a moment, too, when skepticism is still lingering, that we feel a touch of impatience, wondering if the time the film takes in such scenes is asking a bit too much, if it’s all going to be worth it. Just stick around. Bad Behaviour is also full of weird, amusing, and horrifying jolts.

In a sense, Bad Behaviour is not really about its overarching narrative, which is, nevertheless, pretty satisfying. It’s about the exploration of its characters, about the generosity of scenes and situations that give the performers the opportunity to stretch out in those skins. Elon becomes a bit of a sidenote, narratively, once the scene shifts and the film focuses more on the current state of affairs between Dylan and Lucy. But Whishaw delivers so many tasty nuances, indications of self-doubt, self-serving fear, deep confidence, irritation, perhaps a touch of madness, that he remains with you as if he’d had the screen time of a lead character. Some of Elon’s traits exist in the script, no doubt, but, as with Connelly’s equally complex Lucy, the final result is both evidence of long conversations with the director-screenwriter and an astonishing display of the actors’ intelligence and training. There are layered performances across the cast, the kind we don’t get to see very often, even in many of the most celebrated indie and arthouse films. That’s not to say that Bad Behaviour overall is the equal of the best of these. But as a showcase for acting, it’s hard to beat.

Sundance Film Festival screenings of Bad Behaviour: Thursday, January 26 at 9:00PM at The Park Avenue Theater, Park City

You can sum up Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me in two words: “gripping horror.”

From its abrupt beginning to its conclusion, the film takes a hold of you. Okay, enough with the hand puns…

We meet Mia (Sophie Wilde), an Aussie teenager who recently lost her mother and now has a strained relationship with her dad and is staying with her best friend Jade, and Jade’s mother and younger brother, Riley. For a time, the banter, jokes and whining between the three juveniles feels genuine, nostalgic in a way, real, before things turn surreal.

The three teens (including Riley, to Jade’s dismay) join Jade’s boyfriend at a party where guests take turns tying each other to a chair to hold what looks like a graffitied ceramic hand. Those uninitiated think it’s a trick. First, you grasp the hand, then you say “Talk to me” and a ghost appears, then you can choose to let the ghost enter your body. Becoming possessed seems addicting, putting you “in the passenger seat” of your own body, and, of course, providing great Snapchat content. The possession scenes are chilling and give the audience a glimpse of what it’s like for the audience at the party and the soon-to-be possessed.

It’s easy to guess that holding the hand isn’t a good idea, and the film goes to a dark place.

Wilde’s Mia can be all at once relatable, solemn and psychotic. While scary for the audience, it must have been so fun to shoot the bloody and dramatic scenes for the young cast.

Loss, deceit, loyalty and love all come out in this edgy, blood-stained teen film. Images from Talk to Me will remain with you afterward, and the ending needs to be discussed.

If you miss Talk to Me at Sundance, it’s likely to creep up again soon. The Hollywood Reporter has reported that the Australian feature has been nabbed by indie studio A24.

Talk to Me screens on Jan. 25 at the Library Center Theatre in Park City, Jan. 27 at the Park Avenue Theatre in Park City and Jan. 28 at the Megaplex Theatres in SLC.

Visit Sundance’s website for more info.

Find all our Sundance coverage from this year and year’s past. And while you’re here, subscribe and get six issues of Salt Lake magazine, your guide to the best of life in Utah.

Sometimes I Think About Dying opens with a beautiful piece of music as the camera moves through a picturesque Pacific Northwest port town. It’s soulful and emotive and signals the quiet pain and yearning the movie conveys. We end in an office on the edge of the water where Fran (played exquisitely by Daisy Ridley) sits in her cubicle, content and comfortable in her job managing office supplies and requests, watching the simple, if almost boring, lives of her coworkers. Fran is among them but not part of them. Her attention occasionally wanders to the cranes outside, dreams from the night and other places and situations that are decidedly not here. 

Her isolation and anxiety draw out over the first 25 minutes almost to the point of tedium, until new coworker Robert (Dave Merheje) begins messaging her, making jokes, conversation and all-around general charmingness. Fran doesn’t know how to react. All of her responses show her awkwardness in social situations. As Robert persists and slowly pushes Fran into a place of talking, they begin to form a friendship that Fran struggles to understand or navigate. 

Daisy Ridley is both sublime and infinitely charming in this role. So much so that you wonder why we’re not seeing so much more of her in films (and a hope that this film also reminds other filmmakers and execs of this same question). She does an incredible job expressing the pain and barriers that social anxiety incurs. At how attempts to break through those barriers can often result in awkward moments or overstepping of boundaries. Dave Merheje’s extroverted charm provides us with a source of warmth to contrast against the coldness of Fran that we spend most of the movie with. 

Director Rachel Lambert (working from a script by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead) does an incredible job creating a sense of longing and distance as we observe the lives of the people around Fran. On the surface, the subjects of their conversations, discussions and concerns seem banal, trivial or even laughable. They feel like a less funny version of The Office. But underneath the conversations about monitor cables and office supplies, Rachel lets us in on what it feels like to be Fran—to be witnessing life around her without the ability to be involved. To forever be trapped at a distance. 

And here is where my primary concern with the film lies—so much of that pain and struggle is kept at an emotional distance from us. Social anxiety, suicidality and depression manifest often in quiet, silent moments externally. Internally, they are powerful forces and emotions that make the everyday actions of life sometimes extremely difficult and challenging. And while we see the external struggle of Fran, the peeks we get into the inner turmoil are fleeting and feel far away. Fran never seems to want anything in life. Though pained as she might be, she never seems to long for that which she doesn’t have. She just observes it. She doesn’t feel like she risks anything in her actions. She doesn’t seem like she wants to make a change in her life or to upend the world she’s stuck in. So while the pain of her struggles is real (especially to those who understand them in their own lives), Fran is kept distant from us, the audience, in a way that robs some of the emotional complexity and power that is under the skin of the script and Daisy Ridley’s performance. 

Quiet, careful and measured, Sometimes I Think About Dying gives us a strong performance of a woman trapped in the quiet space her anxiety has created for her—a space that I wish we could have seen more.

Upcoming Sundance Film Festival screenings of Sometimes I Think About Dying: Friday, January 27, 2023 at 3:15pm MST at Eccles Theatre, Park City.

“She’s young. It’s not too late for her to have a real family” coaxes Geena Davis’ character “Munca” at the beginning of Fairyland, based on the 2013 memoir of the same name by Alysia Abbott. It follows young father Steve Abbott (Scoot McNairy), as he takes his five-year-old daughter Alysia to San Francisco to raise her by himself after his wife is killed in a car accident. At his wife’s funeral, her mother tries to reason with him to leave his daughter in her care so that she can be raised in a traditional household with a traditional family. Steve rejects that and takes her across the country.

Fairyland in an exploration of what a family is and how the roles of parent and child can be defined and redefined continually throughout life. Once in San Francisco, in 1971, Steve is able to live as an out gay man—something only afforded to him in secrecy up to this point in his life. He hides nothing from his daughter as she becomes an integral part of his relationships, their found family, and home. The film follows their relationship through adulthood as they grapple with substance abuse, neglect, empowerment, homophobia, life, loss and the AIDS epidemic.

Directed and written by Andrew Durham, Fairyland is a heavy, deep, and poignant film. It’s never easy to watch, but Durham doesn’t get bogged down in melodrama or preaching. The entire world and message is filtered through the lives of this father and daughter who struggle under the expectations placed on them by the outside world while in the unexplored territory of their approach to life. 

Durham begins the film, shooting on grainy film stock, with the handling and approach of a brand new filmmaker, but deftly shifts the look and feel of the film to more steady, clear, and mature filmmaking as time goes on. It’s a subtle shift, but masterfully done as Alysia (Emilia Jones) grows up and grows more steady in her role as child/parent to Steve. 

The painful contradiction at the center of the film is that Steve wants to provide a life of freedom, independence, and love to his daughter that he never had. His lack of ability to live authentically has left him in an eternal state of arrested development. When he’s thrown into the role of single parent, he’s not ready or able to raise a child. He struggles and somewhat fails to live up to that role for the rest of his life. But Alysia, with the life she was given, is able to grow up and live up to the challenges life presents her. Toward the end of the film, she’s thrust into a role of responsibility and has to return to the AIDS-ravaged city of her upbringing and care for her ailing father. A role she is not ready for, but one that she is able to rise and meet with strength, compassion, fearlessness and love. 

And that’s the beauty of Fairyland. Bravery and authenticity do not guarantee success, but they provide platforms for others to live the truest versions of their lives because noble failures illuminate the path to noble successes. 

With an incredible cast, led by Scoot McNairy and anchored by Emilia Jones, Fairyland doesn’t move like a traditional narrative film—where choices and challenges of the characters would advance the plot. Time advances the plot. Choices made inside that time change lives, but not the eventual outcome. We’re allowed a window into these quiet lives as they grow, move forward, and wind down. McNairy (as Steve Abbott) brings a cheery, ever-present optimism through the struggles and pain of both his internal and external life. Regardless of his failings and successes, he manages to convey the wonder and love of a poet parent. Emilia Jones portrays Alysia from teenage years into adulthood, a challenging tasks as she struggles to come to terms with the responsibility thrust on her from childhood to care for herself and her father. Her acting is quiet and fierce, stable and caring. 

All in all, the story of Steve and Alysia Abbott told through Fairyland, is a story of the power of family—whether traditional or not—and how the courage to live your life empowers all of those around you.

Upcoming Sundance Film Festival screenings of Fairyland:

Redstone Cinemas – 7, Tuesday, January 24, 2023 9:00PM MT at Redstone Cinemas – 7

Thursday, January 26, 2023 11:20AM MT at The Ray Theatre

Saturday, January 28, 2023 11:55AM MT at Rose Wagner

The emotional narrative of Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance is as simple as its baroque surface is complex. Roki (Isabel Delroy-Olson), a teenaged girl living on the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation, in Oklahoma, has been hanging close to her aunt Jax ever since her mother Tawi, Jax’s sister, went missing. They’re both worried, but Jax (Lily Gladstone) is a master of dissemblance. It’s her superpower. So she appears calm, imperturbable as she reassures Roki that, yes, Tawi will come home in time to dance with her daughter at the upcoming powwow in Oklahoma City. In fact, though, out of Roki’s view, Jax is frantically seeking information about her sister’s whereabouts. 

Jax and Tawi’s brother by another father, JJ, is a cop on the reservation, but he’s not much help, hamstrung in part by federal jurisdiction over missing persons. The sisters’ father, Frank, a white man who has little contact with his daughters since their mother died and he remarried to a white woman, might be better able to pressure the Feds, Jax thinks, but he and his wife Nancy have a more pressing interest in giving Roki a better life—off the reservation. Meanwhile, the terse and deeply sinister Boo presides over the local pawn shop, the center of a nefarious drug network that entangles the strip club where Tawi worked and a nearby RV camp, filled with rough, mostly white miners.

By the time we’ve been situated in this dramatic landscape, relatively early in the film, and a further complication has been added, with Child Protective Services wanting to take Roki out of Jax’s care because of her shady past, we may assume that we will never see Tawi onscreen, except in the missing person posters Jax has spread everywhere. We are expected to understand that, whatever happens, she has joined, at least for a time, the growing roll of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women. But asserting that, dramatizing that, is not the film’s point. The time pressure of the imminent powwow, just a week or so away, will drive Jax to extraordinary measures and great personal risk to avoid witnessing, or causing, her niece’s disappointment. Roki’s innocent desire to dance with her mother, is the only thing that seems to really matter to her, the ultimate enactment not just of their familial bond, but also of the unbreakable attachment Roki has to her culture, which is also performed in the more or less private dialogues she and Jax engage in when they speak Cayuga together.

In a sense, Fancy Dance is a buddy-road picture, with Jax and Roki setting off, the law in their wake, for the powwow. Along the way, Tremblay provides a troubling and revealing panorama of the deep challenges of Native life in contemporary America, not just the limited resources and opportunities of reservation life, but also the marginalization to the point of erasure Native Americans experience just outside the reservation’s borders. Nancy becomes, seemingly despite herself, a kind of emblem of white ignorance and generations of oppression. While not mean spirited, she is, perhaps, the greatest villain of the film because she’s incapable of seeing the harm she does, that has been done since the moment of contact.

In this light, Fancy Dance is really a film about love, about the protection and sense of responsibility enacted through Jax and Roki’s relationship, which Gladstone and Delroy-Olson perform so beautifully and effortlessly. This, too, is a kind of dance. It’s not always pretty. Unity can be a struggle. But the surety of Jax and Roki’s commitment to each other is also a commitment to their culture, and the film’s greatest asset. So many forces, driven by so many motives, line up to crush their bond. But it persists. And it signifies commitments much greater than the two women, providing a quiet and convincing center for Fancy Dance. Like the circle within which the powwow is performed, the embrace of a living culture, its traditions and their significance, stands in defiant contrast to the grim threatening world all around.