“The Film is One Big Conversation. I Could’ve Cut it Ten Different Ways and It Would Still Be the Same Conversation”: Sterlin Harjo on His Netflix Doc Love and Fury

Sterlin Harjo is a longtime Sundance alum who’s directed two docs, three dramatic features and a slew of shorts. He’s also a founding member of Native American comedy quintet The 1491s, and his first comedy series (for FX and streaming on Hulu), the terrifically titled Reservation Dogs, boasts a team exclusively made up of Indigenous writers, directors and series regulars (including EP Taika Waititi who co-wrote the first episode). In other words, Harjo’s identity is solidly Native American (Muscogee Creek/Seminole) and solidly creative artist. Which may make Love and Fury the veteran director’s most personal film yet. (Not to mention his most far-reaching as Harjo, who shoots almost exclusively in his home state of Oklahoma, spent a year-plus, pre-pandemic, traveling across the country and overseas.) The film, which I caught at last year’s Hot Docs, and subsequently got picked up by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY, follows a fascinating slew of insightful Indigenous creatives working in a variety of mediums: from musicians and composers, to visual artists, to poets and writers (including our current US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo). We meet an installation artist whose bead-based project serves as an ode to missing and murdered Indigenous women. (He explains that it “weighs one ton,” but is even heavier to put up every time.) A dancer speaks of her choreography as being all about love, but that doesn’t mean her pieces are “nice.” Another artist notes that her nephew is both “conscious and unconscious” of his heritage: proud to wear his Native dress at ceremonies, yet also bent on being a “Navajo man” for Halloween. A poet reads that, “every american flag is a warning sign even the one my grandfather was given as a code talker.” Or as the bead artist bluntly puts it, the idea that Native Americans are even still here is mind-blowing. And it’s precisely what gives him hope. To find out what gives Harjo hope – and more pessimistically, whether he views “inclusion” as the new whitewash – Filmmaker reached out to the busy director the week before the doc’s Netflix release on December 3 (just in time for National American Indian Heritage Month, naturally).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.