‘Free Leonard Peltier’ review: A 50-year fight for freedom gains momentum

Dirs: Jesse Quick Bull, David France. US. 2025. 110mins

The injustice laid naked by this meticulously made and galvanising documentary runs a lot deeper than that confronted by its topic, Leonard Peltier, an Amerian Indian Movemement (AIM) activist who was jailed in 1975 for the homicide of two FBI brokers throughout a shoot-out at Pine Ridge reservation in North Dakota. Whereas Jesse Quick Bull and David France’s movie is firmly anchored in Peltier’s story, it additionally makes use of his expertise as a springboard to focus on the oppression, institutional racism and abuse confronted by Native Individuals.

 Highlights the oppression, institutional racism and abuse confronted by Native Individuals

France’s prior work contains the Oscar-nominated AIDS documentary How To Survive A Plague, whereas Quick Bull has made the Indigenous rights movie Lakota Nation vs. United States. They show a robust mixture working in tandem right here. The movie had a well timed world premiere at Sundance, solely days after outgoing president Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence with simply minutes remaining of his time period  – a growth the administrators have reworked to incorporate in time for its worldwide premiere at Thessaloniki Documentary Pageant, however one which nonetheless leaves Peltier underneath home arrest. Its three wins there, together with the Silver Alexander, bode effectively for securing a high-profile distribution deal.

The newest chapter of Peltier’s 50-year struggle for freedom bookends the movie, highlighting the way in which through which the 80-year-old’s battle for justice has change into embedded throughout the Native American group. As one campaigner places it: “Many people have been on this wrestle for Leonard for generations of our household.”  The wrestle has been mirrored onscreen too, with numerous narrative and documentary efforts through the years, essentially the most high-profile being Michael Apted and Robert Redford’s collaboration on 1992’s Incident At Oglala (Apted additionally directed Thunderheart, a drama in regards to the occasions at Pine Ridge.)

Having began the movie within the current day, Quick Bull and France spin again 35 years, immersing the viewer in archive footage and utilizing early interviews with Peltier in jail as punctuation, displaying not solely how he jained on the flimsiest of proof, but in addition the foundations of AIM’s activism. Peltier and plenty of of his contemporaries, who seem in speaking head interviews, floor the movie within the historical past of the marketing campaign for rights. 

They contact on topics together with the assimilation methods of the residential boarding colleges many Native Individuals had been compelled to attend – explored in Emily Kassie and Julian Courageous NoiseCat’s  2024 documentary Sugarcane. In addition they define the land-grab nature of an American authorities that was hungry for mineral mining at the moment. The modifying collectively of the archive and speaking heads is slick and additional energised by the rating from Oglala Lakota artist Mato Wayuhi, its sturdy choral aspect reflecting the sense of group spirit that infuses the movie.

The sluggish construct to the confrontation at Pine Ridge, through which FBI brokers Jack Coler and Ronald Williams had been killed alongside Native American Joe Stuntz, permits the administrators to completely set up the context. The movie makes the case that the tribal chief there, Richard Wilson, was “terrorising his personal folks” by organising a vigilante military of kinds referred to as Guardians of the Oglala Nation, which was supported and armed by the FBI and embraced its fame because the ’GOON squad’. 

France beforehand used AI deepfake know-how to guard the identities of individuals in Welcome To Chechnya (2020), and AI is employed right here to scrub up archive voice recordings and to offer voice to a few of Peltier’s writing, together with his permission. It is usually used to recreate occasions on the lethal day. This ‘re-enactment’ aspect is fairly generic compared to the real archive, however provides immediacy to the motion. The primary-person testimony is essentially the most compelling facet of the movie, nevertheless.

After the deaths, Peltier turned the one individual to be convicted, though fellow AIM activists Bob Robideau and Dino Butler had been additionally prosecuted and acquitted. France and Quick Bull present how that growth spurred a vindictiveness in the direction of Peltier on the a part of the FBI, which seems to endure to this present day. The administrators make a forged iron case for the defence, outlining points from withholding proof to doubtful witnesses, together with a historical past of attraction and retrial knockbacks within the face of the details. The Biden determination ensures a robust emotional conclusion, however any sense of decision is undercut by the information that Peltier has nonetheless not been granted full freedom.