‘Fancy Dance’ with Lily Gladstone balances heartbreak, humor in story of a missing Indigenous woman
In “Fancy Dance,” Lily Gladstone stars as Jax, who is searching for her missing sister and caring for her young niece
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lily Gladstone knows the gravity stories about what she calls the “epidemic” of missing and murdered Indigenous people have. But she also values humor in telling those stories.
In “Fancy Dance,” set for a limited theatrical release Friday and streaming release on Apple TV+ June 28, Gladstone plays Jax, who has cared for her niece, Roki, since her sister’s disappearance on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma. As the pair searches for their loved one and prepares for Roki’s upcoming powwow, they share moments of unexpected levity baked into the emotional story.
“You would be very hard pressed to find any Indigenous person in North America today that is not touched by an element of the story very personally,” Gladstone said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “We all know an MMIP (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Person). It’s something that we all collectively kind of grieve and work to fix. … We stick together and we survive through it by being funny, by finding humor in it.”
Newcomer Isabel Deroy-Olson, who stars alongside Gladstone as Roki, said the film’s humor helps the audience get through the heavier moments of the story — which was also true for the actors.
