Screening: Fancy Dance

Acting as caretaker for her missing sister’s daughter, Jax seeks solace—and intel—from a local stripper. Soon, Jax is on the run with her niece and in hot pursuit of her sister’s killer in this absorbing mash-up of mystery, family drama, and tribute to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

Morality gets murky as well-intentioned white grandparents (Audrey Wasilewski and Shea Whigham) are pitted against stoic, wounded Jax (Lily Gladstone, lauded star of Killers of the Flower Moon) and her love for her savvy 13-year-old niece, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson)—a love so strong she will hustle in order to keep them together when everyone from Indian Child Welfare to ICE are on the verge of separating them. Roki’s insistence that her mother will show up at the yearly powwow in Oklahoma City complicates Jax’s hunt, as does a stolen firearm and Roki’s growing suspicions about her own expectations. All they can trust are the lessons they learn together. Softened with hard-earned sweetness, Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance is a Chekhov’s gun of potentially explosive consequences as two kindred spirits search for closure in a world more invested in the veneer of order.