Lily Gladstone and Isabel Deroy-Olson talk "Fancy Dance" with Antonia Gonzales

“Fancy Dance” is premiering this week in select theaters before streaming on Apple TV+.
The film follows Jax, played by Lily Gladstone, who is searching for her missing sister Tawi, while she also cares for her niece Roki, played by Isabel Deroy-Olson, on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma.
We talked to Gladstone and Deroy-Olson about the film raising awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous people.
Gladstone says the film is bringing the issue to a larger scale by finding a home with Apple.
“You're hard pressed to find any Indigenous person that's not touched by this epidemic. We all know somebody, we're all close with somebody, we're all close with somebody who was close with somebody. So it's nothing new to us, but I know that with Killers of the Flower Moon coming out last year, it was a bit of an introduction of this deeper history to a larger audience. And one of the things that came out of it, at least from my view, when you know, I was spoken to because of the character I was carrying and that the woman I was portraying and that people were left wanting more of her story, more of her sister's story. And while Fancy Dance was, it premiered 10 months prior to Killers of the Flower Moon at Sundance in January that same year. It reached audiences first, although a smaller audience. By the end of the year after Killers had come out, people were talking about how they felt like these films needed to be seen in tandem.”
Gladstone says the film addresses missing and murdered Indigenous people in a compassionate way.
“When the audience is invited into the story, I think it's a very important way to approach this issue because we don't show any bodies being brutalized. It's not about the ins and outs of the case. Nobody's trying to prove Tawi’s humanity. It's you learn about her and how missed she is, how valued she is, how loved she is by her absence and by the people who miss her you see what happens in reality, that it's women and people from our own communities who take up the grassroots initiative to search for our missing relatives. When the jurisdiction falls with the FBI, they're not the ones that are taking the necessary action. So it's a way of learning about this epidemic in a very compassionate way, a very inside out way. You learn about the inequities, the obstacles the characters face.”
"Fancy Dance" premieres Friday in select theaters before streaming on Apple TV+ on June 28.

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Aww Lily is such a cuite pie