Part One is a new interview with filmmakers David France (“How to Survive a Plague”) and Jesse Short Bull are the guests on this interview. They’ve co-directed a new documentary called “Free Leonard Peltier” which is now streaming on Netflix. In Part 2 of this episode I’ve included an interview from the fall of 2025 when the film was about to screen at the Woodstock Film Festival. Included in that conversation was also the producer Jhane Myers. This interview was part of the Woodstock Film Festival’s podcast “Let’s Talk Film!”.
Using a mix of contemporary interviews, archival footage and AI recreations, Short Bull and France bring alive the energy of the times, when the American Indian Movement (AIM) was rising up to protest centuries of injustice and oppression, and the US government was pushing back hard. The film chronicles occupations, arrests, demands, assassinations—and in the midst of it all, the story of Peltier, a one-time auto mechanic who joined the AIM movement to protect and advocate for his people and quickly found himself in a war. Short Bull and France situate Peltier’s story in the broad sweep of history, from his forced time in an Indian boarding school to the legal harassment he endured as a young man to the intense siege he found himself in when the FBI descended on the Pine Ridge compound where he and others were staying. “Free Leonard Peltier” vividly captures the climate of fear and apprehension that pervaded Pine Ridge at the time—and once Peltier is accused of murdering two FBI agents, it tracks the legal machinations and dirty pool tactics that saw him arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned, all on the basis of evidence long since shown to be inconclusive at best and falsified at worst. On the fiftieth anniversary of the shootout on Pine Ridge, with Peltier still in prison, Short Bull’s and France’s documentary arrives to revisit his case in a new era and to advocate for just what its title suggests: “Free Leonard Peltier”
