By Sarah Fishman
“Fancy Dance,” a film that showcases the beauty of the Seneca-Cayuga nation in Oklahoma, stunned a UC Santa Barbara audience recently at the Pollock Theater.
As part of its “Storytelling for the Screen” series, the Carsey-Wolf Center hosted queer and Native American director, writer, and producer Erica Tremblay for a post-screening conversation with moderator Lisa Parks, a professor in UCSB’s Film and Media Studies department.
Tremblay’s film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, shines a light on the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), which refers to the grave magnitude of violence against women, girls, and other individuals from Native communities in the United States and Canada, as well as the failure of the criminal justice system.
“Fancy Dance” follows 13-year-old Roki, played by breakout actor Isabel Deroy-Olsen, whose mother Tawi is missing. Lily Gladstone, winner of the Golden Globe Award for best actress in a drama for the film “Killers of the Flower Moon,” plays Roki’s aunt Jax. The pair are on the run from law enforcement together after Roki was taken by Child Protective Services and placed in the custody of her white grandparents, who are well-meaning but ill-equipped to care for her.
Jax, who is in a relationship with a woman named Sapphire, searches for her sister as her niece Roki holds out hope that Tawi will return in time for their annual mother-daughter dance at the upcoming powwow—a gathering for First Nations communities.
In the film “Fancy Dance” Roki walks next to her aunt Jax, wearing her mother’s jacket, which director Erica Tremblay described as a physical representation of the mother—like a hug wrapped around her.
The film is a “love letter to the folks that keep our communities safe,” Tremblay said, especially the women, elders, and queer people in these roles. Tremblay worked to honor queer identity in the film, saying her heroes as she grew up were women such as Jax. The filmmaker stressed that behind every one of Jax’s decisions in the film is a desire to protect her family.
As a former sex worker, Tremblay stressed the importance of not shying away from stigmatizing topics, so the character of Roki’s mother worked at a strip club before her disappearance. Tremblay wanted the film to highlight the humanity of these characters and honor the complexity of their lives—a balancing act of avoiding ‘poverty porn’ without obscuring the reality of their lived experiences. Tawi “deserved to be looked for and deserved to be found,” Trembay explained, “regardless of what her job was.”
“Fancy Dance,” she said, confronts the immense pain in Indigenous communities as women like Tawi are taken from their families, and what it does to the people left behind—particularly in the face of ignorance and incompetence among law enforcement agencies, which often severely neglect these cases.
Writer-director Erica Tremblay spoke at UCSB on the experience of creating her film “Fancy Dance.”
At the same time, Tremblay wanted the inadequacies of the American justice system to be shown against the background of Jax and Tawi’s beautiful family. She stressed that humor, love, and laughter are essential to get through the experience of grief and marginalization.
The film celebrates dance as a “physical manifestation of their cultural love.” Tremblay spent a lot of time at powwows growing up, where the community comes together to connect.
“Fancy Dance” also embraced the need to preserve and revive the Seneca-Cayuga language, with multiple scenes incorporating it. With only 21 first language speakers left, the language is considered extinct. But in the film, Tremblay wanted it to “feel like the living, breathing language that it is.”
Having spent three years on a reservation in Canada in a language immersion program, the director also chose to honor the matriarchal and matrilineal systems rooted in the Cayuga language.
Gladstone and Deroy-Olson spent hours each day learning the language. Tremblay described the process as a special and intimate experience, “something that the two of them shared.”
One of Tremblay’s favorite moments in the journey of making “Fancy Dance” was showing the film to the tribe’s elders, who she described as “beautiful people who shepherded the language when it was not meant to survive.” She remembers the pride in their positive feedback. “[There was] this feeling of, “you did good,’” she said.
Sarah Fishman is a third-year UCSB Communication major and Applied Psychology minor, pursuing a second minor in Professional Writing. She wrote this article for the Writing Program course Digital Journalism.