‘Free Leonard Peltier’ Filmmakers on How Recently Released Activist Continues His Fight for Indigenous Communities: ‘His Fire Is Undiminished’

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias You would have been hard-pressed to find a timelier film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival than “Free Leonard Peltier,” directors Jesse Short Bull and David France’s documentary about the Native American activist who spent nearly 50 years in prison for the murder of two federal agents, a crime he insists he didn’t commit.

Just days ahead of the film’s Park City premiere, Peltier received clemency from President Joe Biden in one of his last acts before leaving office, sending the filmmakers back to the cutting room to hurriedly incorporate new material into their documentary. “The announcement came from the White House with 14 minutes left to Biden’s presidency,” says France. “We were watching on our cell phones.

The [Trump] inauguration had already begun. Biden was already in the room. The speeches and songs were taking place. And then the word came.” “Free Leonard Peltier,” which plays this week in the international competition at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, is a decades-spanning portrait of an activist who, as a leading member of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, fought to expose the injustices perpetrated by the U.S.

government against Native American communities. Described by Variety’s Joe Leydon as a “persuasively well-researched and often infuriating documentary” that delivers a “potent history lesson,” it is an attempt, says France, to “bring [Peltier’s story] to a whole new generation.” Indeed, this isn’t the first time that the Native American activist has made it to the big screen: Both “Thunderheart,” the 1992 drama directed by Michael Apted loosely based on the events that landed Peltier behind bars, and Apted’s acclaimed documentary “Incident at Oglala,” narrated by.