Coming to PBS’s Independent Lens this Monday, November 25: YOUNG LAKOTA
Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt’s portrait of political awakening on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation has screened at festivals including New Orleans, Big Sky, Cine Las Americas, imagineNative, Red Nation, SF American Indian, London’s Native Spirit, and Cucalorus, as well as community screenings around the country. Now PBS broadcasts the doc as part of Native American Heritage Month.
Like their previous THE EDUCATION OF SHELBY KNOX, Lipschutz and Rosenblatt’s new film focuses on the political engagement of young people in the face of restrictive, reactionary politics. When South Dakota proposes a far-reaching statewide anti-abortion ban – even in the case of rape or incest – Cecilia Fire Thunder, the first female president of the Oglala Lakota Nation, pledges to build a women’s clinic on the rez to provide reproductive rights. This costs Fire Thunder her position and splits the community in the process. Falling on different sides of the controversy are the film’s protagonists – college student Sunny, who has returned home to Pine Ridge, where her twin sister has abandoned her education due to pregnancy, following in the footsteps of their mother, and their friend Brandon, a young father, who also has returned to the rez to reconnect with his Native roots. Lipschutz and Rosenblatt have found engaging and evolving characters to explore a different, complex view of Native American experience and its intersection with the country’s larger culture wars.
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