Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Cinema’s most prominent Native American presence in generations — arguably ever — Lily Gladstone was the Academy-nominated revelation of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, although it was her performance in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 Certain Women that first put her on the map. Now Gladstone stars in and executive-produces Fancy Dance, a film that isn’t remotely fancy itself. The film is in that category of indie cinema that, like a certain strain of US literary fiction, you could label “dirty realism”: compassionate, rooted in the working-class everyday, determinedly averse to bullshit, whether sentimental or stylistic.Set in Oklahoma, with dialogue partly in Cayuga, it is directed and co-written by Erica Tremblay, herself of the Seneca-Cayuga people. Gladstone plays Jax, a woman looking after her 13-year-old niece Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson), whose mother Tawi has vanished. Jax distributes “Missing” posters and pressures local police to step up the search; meanwhile, Roki is desperate to attend an upcoming powwow, where she is convinced that Tawi will show up to perform a traditional dance with her.That dreamed-of duet is just one of the fancy dances here; another is the wary set of moves between Jax and the authorities, with ordinary struggles all the more challenging for members of a community that has not just been marginalised but hemmed into small corners of the continent.This story could easily have been given a brash pulp thriller treatment: instead, former documentarist Tremblay opts for a no-frills observational style, which allows her to seamlessly integrate strands of mystery, road movie and family melodrama. There is something similarly down-to-earth in the easy rapport between Gladstone and newcomer DeRoy-Olson, and in the way that Gladstone uses her face and body — undemonstrative, relaxed to the point of languor, but buzzing with taut determination. Neither she nor the film do any kind of flashy number to catch our eye, but they absolutely compel our attention.★★★★☆ In UK cinemas from June 21 and on Apple TV+ from June 28
