“A lot of what I’ve been interested in is the overall idea of justice in an unfair world,” says Brooke Pepion, follows a Lummi woman who was adopted by a white family as she meets her birth mother, reconnects with her tribe, and grapples with what it means to be Native. (The 2021 festival release is newly available for streaming on .) Pepion Swaney’s first love is fiction, though, and she especially loves comedy—a proclivity that’s evident in her in-development sitcom, , about a woman’s dating misadventures after returning to her family’s reservation. The project snagged a prestigious mention on the first Indigenous List, a collection of promising film and television scripts created by Sundance Institute, Black List, and IllumiNative in 2020. “When I came out of film school 10 years ago, there wasn’t faith that Native people could [create] content people would want to watch,” says Pepion Swaney, an enrolled citizen of the Blackfeet Nation who also has Salish ancestry. “Now, it feels exciting that there’s more opportunity for artists like me.”
