2023/24 Season Membership: £70 / Guest Tickets – £12 (both available on the door)
USA/UK • Drama • Year: 2023 – Running time: 115 mins
Languages: English/Sioux
Audience Response: 14 slips returned
- ‘Excellent’: 3 votes
- ‘Very Good’: 8 votes
- Good’: 2 votes
- ‘Satisfactory’: 0 votes
- ‘Poor’: 0 vote
- + one comment left without a category
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Synopsis:
The interlocking stories of two young Oglala Lakota men growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation; the world built against them, navigating their unique paths to manhood.
Debut feature for half-sisters Riley Keough (Actress: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), American Honey (2016)) and Gina Gammell
The non-professional cast, drawn from the community in which these interlocking, quasi-mythic tales of manhood in the making are set, is rooted, real and persuasive.
Wendy Ide (The Guardian)
Directors: Gina Gammell • Riley Keough
Writers: Franklin Sioux Bob • Bill Reddy • Gina Gammell
Main Cast:
| Jojo Bapteise Whiting | Bill |
| LaDainian Crazy Thunder | Matho |
| Jesse Schmockel | Echo |
| Anjeliq Aurora | Carly |
| Iona Red Bear | Auntie |
| Jessica Poor Bear | Coltina |
| Schaevon Brewer | Schaevon |
(for full cast list, additional technical information and reviews, please visit the War Pony pages in IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes).
CFC Film Notes:
Directed and produced by actor Riley Keough and her half-sister, Gina Gammell, War Pony follows the intertwined lives of two young Native American boys growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
The film comes out of Keough and Gammell’s work on Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, during which shoot they befriended extras Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy, and through a collaborative process of conversations, workshops and improvisation sessions, built up a narrative based on their life stories.
The result is this unvarnished, naturalistic look at the lives of two Oglala Lakota youths. At 23, Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) cruises around town in an old car, taking prison phone calls from the mother of his first child and trying his hardest to charm Echo (Jesse Schmockel), the mother of his second. Wanting to make something of himself (whether it’s siphoning gas, delivering goods or breeding poodles), he is determined to hustle his way to the “American Dream”.
Sweet, dreamy Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder), 12 years old, has a crush on a girl at school and desperate to win approval from his young, abusive father. But a series of impulsive decisions turns Matho’s life upside down, forcing him to leave home, moving in with a relative (Iona Red Bear), but finds himself unequipped to deal with the harsh realities of the adult world.
Both main characters are torn between the traditions of their tribe and the consumer culture that surrounds them, both implicated in the difficulties faced by Native populations in the broader American scheme. Heartfelt and absorbing, War Pony is a tender depiction of the two boys’ interior and exterior worlds, and a terrific debut from Keough and Gammell.