‘Free Leonard Peltier’ Review: Doc About Imprisoned Indigenous Activist Is Timelier Than Ever, but Leaves Too Much Unexamined
Late in Jesse Short Bull and David France’s new documentary Free Leonard Peltier, Native activist Nick Tilsen sings the praises of Leonard Peltier’s sense of humor but expresses a note of concern. Peltier has an edgy sensibility, and Tilsen jokes that it would be bad if, after spending nearly 50 years in prison, Peltier was released and promptly canceled.
It’s an amusing aside that quickly makes two points: Whatever sense of humor Peltier possesses, Free Leonard Peltier hasn’t successfully been able to illustrate it; nor has the documentary actually been able to convey any version of Leonard Peltier’s personality at all. Peltier, here, is an idea and a cause, not a person. To me, that suggests either a flaw in approach or a flaw in focus, since a documentary about the multi-decade struggle to get Leonard Peltier released from prison — rather than a documentary reciting the facts of Leonard Peltier’s legal case for the umpteenth time — could absolutely have been compelling viewing. But Free Leonard Peltier is much more the latter than the former.
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Free Leonard Peltier is almost certainly the most timely film premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: It arrives at Park City with a print still wet from President Joe Biden’s January 19 decision to commute Peltier’s criminal conviction for the murder of two federal agents from life in prison to indefinite house arrest. (The filmmakers had to rush back to the cutting room to add the new material before its premiere in Park City.)
The recent headlines that have made Free Leonard Peltier so urgent and of-the-moment, though, are ironically what leaves it feeling strangely behind the curve, because the things that feel like they’ve just been resolved actually raise a bunch of new questions that go unexamined here. The documentary has its finger on a pulse, but it isn’t prepared to say what the newly measured heart rate means.
For around two-thirds of its 111-minute running time, Free Leonard Peltier is a dry recitation of the details leading up to and surrounding the 1975 standoff and shootout at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Context is given to the development of the American Indian Movement of the ’60s and ’70s, addressing centuries of treaty-breaking, the boarding school system and conflicts with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and establishing ample precedent for the U.S. government’s efforts to erase Indigenous cultures, wholesale. Context, but not much depth.
Although the documentary includes no new interviews with Peltier, older interviews are used to complement new conversations with a number of the activists who were at Pine Ridge on the day of the shootout. There’s footage from protests and events surrounding the shootout, but when that falls short, the filmmakers use what press notes describe as “AI recreations.” I’ll leave it for others to debate the ethics of the AI choice, but I’ll say that the reenactments have no notable visual aesthetic and add very little information. It’s a choice to fill space — little more.
Within the dry-recitation portion of the documentary, Short Bull and France do some picking and choosing of facts that don’t assist their argument. You’ll know that the connection between Peltier and the gun tied to the bullets that killed the two agents has been largely disproven, despite still being the basis of the government’s case decades later. There’s no mention of his shifting versions of the story over the years, nor, when the film mentions that Peltier was serving life plus seven years, is it even acknowledged that those seven years stem from a 1979 prison escape. These details don’t, for me at least, do anything to mitigate how generally legally railroaded Peltier was over the years, but they’re part of the story.
Beyond the detail with the gun, the documentary positions the injustice perpetrated against Peltier as part of the tradition of erasure, which it surely was. But that doesn’t feel all that new because, as the documentary notes, efforts to get Peltier pardoned and erased have been getting headlines going back at least to the end of the Clinton administration, but before that as well.
Maybe that’s why the aspect of the documentary that I found most potent was the active and current campaign, watching multiple new generations of Native activists coming together to work on behalf of this icon of the old. When Tilsen and Holly Cook Macarro and other advocates are assisting on Peltier’s last parole hearing, and when they work to make residential plans for Peltier’s post-relief life, that feels fresh and yet connected to the past in potent ways. Plus, because it’s current, the filmmakers aren’t forced to make choices like the AI recreations. We’re there.
It’s simply the unavoidable truth that Free Leonard Peltier will never have an exclusive claim to being the only documentary to tell Leonard Peltier’s story, but it will always have an exclusive claim to being embedded with the Native activists when Biden’s commutation came through. It’s the last moment of the documentary, and it’s a moment the filmmakers had to know was a possibility with Biden’s White House tenure coming to an end.
Despite that preparation, though, the documentary ends with a celebration that doesn’t address what it means that Peltier was given house arrest and not simply pardoned. This is a documentary about injustice arriving at exactly the moment that justice, at least on the surface, has been done. But has it really? What would justice even look like in the life of Leonard Peltier?
I understand why a Sundance premiere benefits the documentary’s visibility and how it produces a nice symmetry, given that Robert Redford has been a longtime support of Peltier’s cause and narrated the 1992 film, Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story. But it doesn’t appear to have benefited the quality of Free Leonard Peltier.
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