Jojo Bapteise Whiting, Ladainian Crazy Thunder, Jesse Schmockel, Sprague Hollander
Directed and produced by actor Riley Keough (Zola) and her collaborator Gina Gammell, the Camera d’Or-winning 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, on 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 teenagers. 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 the mother of his second. Sweet, dreamy Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) has a crush on a girl at school. Leaving home due to his abusive father, he faces new difficulties when he moves in with a relative.
Both 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.
