Acclaimed Pine Ridge film is one story; how it was made is another

A new film playing this weekend at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis took four years to make, cost next to no money, and is drawing international acclaim.

"Songs My Brothers Taught Me" was shot on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. It's a drama about the challenges facing young people on the reservation, and the story of how it was made is as remarkable as the film itself.

It was written and directed by Chloe Zhao, who was born in Beijing and moved to the United States as a teenager. A self-described city kid who had lived for a decade and a half in New York, she began traveling west looking for stories to film.

She ended up in South Dakota, on Pine Ridge, delving into the complexities and paradoxes that abound in reservation life.

"The idea of a line drawn, the sovereign nation," she said. "What does it mean to be free on a place where it is confined like that?"

"Songs My Brothers Taught Me" tells the story of a young man named Johnny Winters. As the film opens he is riding bareback, talking about the right way to break horses.

"Anything that runs wild got something bad in them," he says. "You want to leave some of that in there, because they need it to survive out here." Johnny dreams of becoming a boxer, but he supports his family by smuggling and selling beer and liquor in the dry community where he lives.

Johnny and his sister Jashaun have rarely seen their father, a rodeo bull-rider who has had children with several women. When he dies in a house fire many of those kids meet and talk about their memories of him. It all makes Johnny wonder about his future on Pine Ridge.

The story came together as a result of three years Zhao spent in the community. Reservations often have a reputation for being suspicious of outsiders, but Zhao had few problems.

"You know, I left China when I was 14, by myself," she said. "So I have always been going to societies and families and communities [that were] not my own. So I am a bit of a chameleon that way, maybe. I am also Chinese. I don't look that different than the Lakota people. I am, but I blend in really easily."

She also found people excited by the idea of making a drama.

"Pine Ridge is used to cameras," she said. "But they are usually documentary or journalistic cameras, where they are considered a subject matter or issue. So when they hear this is not about that, this is about fiction — that really, I think, lowered people's guards."

Even as she was developing a script, she was also looking for actors. She stopped people she saw walking down the road, recruited people when she visited their homes. She found the actor for Johnny Winters, a young man called John Reddy, in an unusual way too.

"I collected high school yearbooks," she recalled. "And I saw Johnny's face in that page. And I thought, 'Wow, he has such amazing eyes. I hope he can act!'"

It turned out he really can.

She found her other lead actor, eighth-grader Jashaun St. John, dancing at a pow wow. She plays Johnny's little sister, who confronts him about his secret plans to leave for Los Angeles with his girlfriend.

"I heard you two talking about it. Are you really leaving me?" she demands tearfully. "I hate you!"

The biggest challenges Zhao faced were the usual for small films — mainly involving funding. She wrote a script, "but then three years in, I couldn't raise the money to make the movie," she said.

So she came up with a radical plan. She ditched her script in favor of a five-page outline. She gathered the people she thought would make for good actors and began improvising and shooting.

"We shot as much as we could. We were very greedy. We shot 100 hours of footage," Zhao said. "The real challenge, I think, started in the editing room."

They teased out a story that Zhao believes captures what it's like to live on Pine Ridge. It shows the beauty of the country, the strength of the people. It also shows the ugliness of poverty and substance abuse.

"If you have spent time on not just Pine Ridge but any reservation, you would know that I definitely didn't show the best that the reservation has, but I also definitely didn't show the worst," Zhao said.

Zhao said the film drew applause when it screened on the reservation. It drew critical acclaim when it premiered at Sundance and was nominated for the best first film award at Cannes.

Now, Zhao is excited the film is being shown in Minneapolis. But she's really pumped for its release on DVD and on Netflix in coming months. That, she said, is how it's going to get to the broader Native audience she wants to see it.