![]() Whiting plays Bill with an understated suaveness. She rolls her eyes and wants to know why he isn’t around. He flirts and tries to tell her about the poodle business. When an older community member sees Matho and his friends shoplifting, she pays for their cache of sweets before the owner has time to get upset.Īt the gas station, Bill runs into Echo (Jesse Schmockel), his current girlfriend and the mother of his second child. This is a community where everyone knows each other, even if everyone doesn’t know each other. ![]() What initially seems to be a hustle-or-get-hustled culture is one of mutual aid. These sequences - shot by DP David Gallego and edited by Affonso Gonçalves and Eduardo Serrano - reveal the rules governing Pine Ridge. Transitions are fluid: The camera follows Matho and his friends into a gas station convenience store only to leave the scene with Bill. ![]() War Pony confidently darts between Bill and Matho’s stories. His money-making scheme involves skimming his father’s meth stash and reselling it to neighborhood addicts. We meet him riding around the neighborhood with his friends, hustling and committing petty theft. The kid is obsessed with fashioning a hyper-masculine identity, performing a kind of uneasy swagger. Matho needs money too, but for different reasons. Before Bill can make sense of the apparition, the majestic creature trudges off screen. Money won’t solve all of Bill’s problems, but it will make them easier to weather. He is the father of two young kids the mother of his first child is in jail and the mother of his second is mad at him. To him (and really only him), the plan is promising. He buys the dog back from its owner for $900. After learning the value of the abandoned poodle he returned, Bill decides to become a breeder. The unassuming film opens with Bill brainstorming how to make some money. Similarly to Hulu’s television series Reservation Dogs, War Pony uses interlocking plotlines as portals to a broader, stirring account of the people of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. ![]() Gammell and Keough, with the help of Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy, have penned a coming-of-age movie that shimmers with adoring community stories. Screenwriters: Franklin Sioux Bob, Bill Reddy, Riley Keough, Gina Gammell Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)Ĭast: Jojo Bapteise Whiting, Ladainian Crazy Thunder, Jesse Schmockel, Wilma Colhoff, Iona Red Bear The fruit of a year-long collaboration, War Pony is also a moving experiment in collective narrative filmmaking - an example of how stories can honor instead of exploit. It’s a slow-burning film, one that pulls you in with its steady observations of the minor triumphs and major pitfalls of Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), a goofy 23-year-old Oglala Lakota man trying to make ends meet, and Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder), a 12-year-old desperate for his father’s approval. It ends with the humans being turned into the first herd of bison, creatures instituted to guide people as they populate the Creator’s masterpiece.īison, which represent sustenance, survival and community in Oglala Lakota tradition, loom large in War Pony, an intimate debut feature directed by Riley Keough ( Zola) and her collaborator Gina Gammell. It’s an enthralling narrative in which said spirits lure humans from their underground lodgings to Earth’s surface before the Creator is finished. A version of the Oglala Lakota tribe story begins like many origin tales - with bickering spirits and Earth still under construction.
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