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The Beautiful People
TYPE: Documentary Feature
GENRE: Documentary
STATUS: Production
LOGLINE
Generations after surviving genocide, a group of Northern Cheyenne Indians struggle to heal the trauma that has been consuming their culture ever since. They ask themselves: Is tradition the path back to being “the beautiful people” they once were?
SYNOPSIS
A weathered voice sifts through flowing prairie grass under a roiling bank of thunder clouds. The keeper of Cheyenne songs is sharing a gift, a piece he wrote for his niece in the language of their ancestors. The song commemorates her survival from a death hardly known in their time, an attempted suicide that she narrowly escaped. Among many other things, this is what it means to be a modern Cheyenne Indian.
Once known to other tribes as “The Beautiful People”, it was said that the Cheyenne had the best horses, the most beautiful lodges, and the best hunting grounds on the High Plains. Cheyenne men were known for their bravery and Cheyenne women for their grace. Today the Northern Cheyenne Nation, despite so many talents and strengths, struggles to provide opportunity, health, and happiness to its members.
At the heart of the narrative is the 2013 death of a young Northern Cheyenne woman named Hanna Harris. Murdered on the 4th of July by members of her own community. Her death was a wakeup call for the reservation about the violence cycling through the community. Her family began a series of marches through their town demanding justice and accountability for the circumstances around her death. While we were filming, Hanna’s mother Malinda began receiving nationwide recognition for her family’s work in calling attention to the staggering numbers of missing and murdered Native people in America. Along with other stories, the film will focus on the Harris family’s struggle to heal, and how it mirrors the process the whole tribe is undertaking.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
This project started as a look at the issue of missing and murdered women in North America. Months of research led us to the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, where we began to realize that much deeper scars underlyed the story we thought we were searching for. The resulting film follows a group of Cheyennes, each working in their own way to recapture an identity that is slowly being buried by generation-after-generation of coping with profound adversity: Ways this small tribe has survived a both literal and cultural genocide. Our goal is to understand what happens when a whole society loses its identity in exchange for one assigned to it by outside forces, and what it means when managing trauma becomes more than a task at hand, but an intergenerational culture.
KEY CREW
Shane Thomas McMillan - Director/Cinematographer
Filmmaker and photographer Shane McMillan is a non-Native from western Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation. It was there that his love of language and story was born, listening to old cowboys and Indians tell their tales. In 2010 he graduated from the University of Montana with degrees in journalism, German, and international development studies. He was awarded a Fulbright Guest Journalist grant to Berlin where he interned as a photographer at the Associated Press, covering the German chancellery. From 2014 to 2015 he taught photography and filmmaking at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. From 2015 to 2016 he was the studio manager to the artist Nan Goldin. Since then he has focused his work on the linkages between human rights, economic issues, and the environment. He’s been published in the New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, PRI, and Slate, among others.
Samer Halabi Cabezón - Editor/Assistant Director
Samer Halabi Cabezon is a film director and editor based in Berlin. Samer holds a master's degree in Philosophy and Communication Sciences from Technical University of Berlin. For the decade following his graduation, he worked his way up from content & media production to management in a marketing and PR company. In 2011, he decided to pivot towards his real passion: filmmaking. He started with a year-long training in multimedia journalism and since 2015 has pursued a degree in directing at the filmArche Berlin to diversify his storytelling skills. His most successful work to date is a noir-inspired documentary STRASSENSAMURAI. Beyond his work in film, Samer has been a trainer for the Chinese martial art Wing Tsun for over 22 years and worked as a fight choreographer on several films, including Tor Iben's last film YEAR OF THE TIGER.
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