‘Free Leonard Peltier’ Follows A 50-Year Trail To Justice For Native American Icon – Thessaloniki Int’l Documentary Festival
deadline.comIt’s an elusive dream for so many docmakers: to impact legislation, to find justice, to make a difference. To change the world.
With Free Leonard Peltier, filmmakers Jesse Short Bull (Lakota Nation vs. United States) and David France (How To Survive a Plague) achieved their eponymous goal: Seven days before the world premiere of their film at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in January, President Joe Biden, in his last act before leaving office, issued a clemency order, commuting Peltier’s sentence to home confinement.
The Native American activist had served nearly 50 years in a federal prison, having been convicted of murder of two FBI agents in a shootout at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975.
Peltier’s attorneys and supporters would wage a decades-long battle through appeals, writs and petitions to circuit courts, federal courts, the U.S.
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