'Fancy Dance' foregrounds a Native language. Its director wants Hollywood to go much further
LOS ANGELES — For filmmaker Erica Tremblay, "Fancy Dance" has already achieved the highest of honors.
After screening the film for an audience of Cayuga-language speakers in Toronto this past year, one of the elders grabbed her by the cheeks and told her "good job" in Cayuga.
"Some of them were crying because they're in their 80s and 90s and they've never seen their language in a film before," says Tremblay. "To me, that's the biggest award that the film has received so far."
"Fancy Dance," which hit theaters last week in limited release before arriving on Apple TV+ on Friday, follows Jax (Lily Gladstone) and her teenage niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), for whom she has been caring since the disappearance of Roki's mother. As Jax juggles searching for her sister and helping Roki prepare for an upcoming powwow dance, authorities come to take Roki away from the reservation and place her with her white grandfather.
Directed by , 43, who co-wrote the script with Tlingit screenwriter Miciana Alise, "Fancy Dance" marks the Seneca-Cayuga filmmaker's narrative feature debut. in Park City, Utah. Like her 2020 short (which also stars Gladstone), "Fancy Dance" is set in and around the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma.
