When Benny, a new-to-the-reservation 11-year-old boy spending the summer with his grandmother to connect with his family's Navajo culture, sits down for dessert with the matriarch and his young cousin, he's promptly given the "Visitor's Fork." Its tines are twisted atop a mismatched handle, a physically uncomfortable reminder to its user that they don't belong at the table.
Benny's a bit affronted. His cousin Fry sizes him up. Benny's eyes take in the utensil, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He then quickly serves himself a slice of cake, picks up the fork, and, with the roof of his mouth closing on the gnarled metal, gamely takes his bite.
It's one of several gracefully symbolic scenes in Frybread Face and Me, a reflectively heartfelt dramedy set in the 1990s and the feature-length narrative debut of filmmaker Billy Luther (Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna Pueblo), who aims to take on the representation of young, Native characters on screen.
"It's needed. We need to see young kids, our Native kids, on screen," Luther told Mashable. "What's really important for me, and why I came into film, was because I never saw that growing up. My outsider, nerdy self was just ready to tell the story."
Premiering this week at SXSW, it's easy to see why many outlets would pick up the Indigenous coming-of-age story executive produced by Oscar-nominated director and actor Taika Waititi, a name that has become synonymous with both the high-budget swings of Marvel and the representational tales of movies like Jojo Rabbit and Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Waititi, who frequently references his own Māori heritage, has made a point to support Indigenous stories(opens in a new tab), also co-creating FX's Reservation Dogs, which follows the emotionally turbulent lives of Indigenous teens in Oklahoma.
But it would be unfair to only peg this story to Waititi's high-profile influence. Here, the 83-minute film, packed with the warmth and scarcity of reservation life in the American western desert, is adamantly, proudly, Diné (a self-identification for the Navajo Nation, which is frequently translated as "The People"). It is braided with first-time performances and Native actors who have worked hard for varied careers, woven together by Luther's personal experiences growing up in reservation-adjacent towns along Route 66 and his expertise as a documentary filmmaker.
"It took a lot of community and teamwork to make this film. Financing was tough, because there's no big stars in the Native community, and it was a film with no names," Luther explained. "There aren’t many Native films out there to begin with, and there definitely aren’t many Native films out there like this."
'Frybread Face and Me' makes every effort to be anything but a stereotype or cliché, despite its simple plot and straightforward acting performances from its supporting cast.
In 2018, IllumiNative(opens in a new tab), a Native women-led advocacy organization, released the first Reclaiming Native Truth(opens in a new tab) study, which analyzed the impact of dominant Indigenous narratives and cultural representations on the community's fight for equity. "Across the education curriculum, pop culture entertainment, news media, social media, and the judicial system, the voices and stories of contemporary Native peoples are missing. Into this void springs an antiquated or romanticized narrative, ripe with myths and misperceptions," the group wrote in the study's summary(opens in a new tab). The organization found that Native representation had made up, at most, only 0.4 percent of characters in primetime television and popular films.
This lack of inclusion also informs part of a growing activist movement and its calls for urgency regarding the treatment of Indigenous individuals and their communities.
In 2020, Native American and Indigenous creatives in Hollywood, as part of the Writers Guild of America West’s Native American & Indigenous Writers Committee, published an open letter to Hollywood leaders demanding they address "inadequate representation"(opens in a new tab) and exclusion from industry-wide diversity promises. In the years since, the entertainment industry has gone on an ambling journey(opens in a new tab) to bolster its support and representation of Indigenous storytelling on screen. A 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report(opens in a new tab) by the University of California, Los Angeles found that Native actors still made up only 0.4 percent of roles on cable scripted shows, 0.8 percent for digital scripted shows, and 2 percent of broadcast shows. For film, Native artists only held 0.6 percent of all acting roles(opens in a new tab) on the big screen and represented 0.8 percent of directors and writers.
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Frybread Face and Me makes every effort to be anything but a stereotype or cliché, despite its simple plot and straightforward acting performances from its supporting cast. When Benny (played by first-time actor Keir Tallman) is introduced to viewers, he's raving about skirt-twirling Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks. He's acting out the pregnancy dramas of a fictional TV soap opera with his G.I. Joe action figures. He's being accosted by his overbearing, traditionally masculine father for not being enough of a man, which is later reiterated by his bull-riding Uncle Marvin (Westworld's Martin Sensmeier).
"Are you a cowboy or a cowgirl?" Marvin aims at Benny early in the movie. "I'm… just Benny?" the young boy responds.
Shut out by his male family members, Benny connects in eye-opening ways with the women in his life, like his embracing grandmother (a breakout performance from Sarah H. Natani.) Despite a language barrier — Grandmother only speaks to Benny and his family in the Navajo language he was never taught — she showers him, literally, and metaphorically in words of affirmation as she personally washes his hair with her own aged hands. Benny's also nurtured by his Aunt Lucy (Kahara Hodges), a beaded earring maker and "free spirit" accused of being a "hairy armpit lesbian," who has dreams of starting a beauty parlor.
But where Benny makes his deepest connection is with cousin Fry, the titular "Frybread Face" tomboy (played by Charley Hogan) who is summarily dropped off at Grandma's trailer just like Benny and who presses a firm finger on Benny's parental and cultural bruises. Fry (a shortened version of her nickname which obscures her real name, Dawn) is deeply connected to her Navajo community, almost to a fault.
"Mick Fleetwood is the best drummer in the world," Benny relays to Fry in one of their attempts at crossing a canyon of pop culture differences. "Clearly you've never been to a powwow before," is her response.
Luther and his fellow filmmakers were doing their part in raising the next generation of Indigenous creatives.
Layered cultural exchange is the heart of Frybread Face and Me, conducted frequently over the dinner table or through the sparring of insults and nicknames. It's the storytelling device that lets viewers learn the particular details of this family's Diné culture, and it's also how the cast and crew navigated filming while in New Mexico, a location they chose due to the closures of Navajo Nation land during the COVID-19 lockdowns(opens in a new tab).
Tallman and Hogan got frequent lessons in '90s pop culture references, like cassette tapes and Cabbage Patch dolls, and mentorship from older actors like Sensmeier. Each of the cast's personal histories informed the direction of the set, physically and emotionally — Grandma's trailer was just like their own family members', and Benny's "rezzed-out" relatives were deeply recognizable. While on set watching VHS tapes, Hogan recalled memories of "doing mischief" and watching movies with her family on the reservation. "It really made me feel like I was at home with my own family. It put a warmth in my heart," she said.
For many, the experiences were on-screen mirrors of their own. "Each time we would start filming, it didn't feel like there was a camera right there," Tallman reflected. "We would just be like, 'We're with family.'"
"It felt like we were back on the rez. The ranch is a character," Luther said. "This land, Grandmother's house, everything around it — it is a character in the film." Through the funding and creation of a film like Frybread Face and Me, replete with representation in cast and crew, Luther and his fellow filmmakers were doing their part in raising the next generation of Indigenous creatives. "I want them to have this memory of us letting them be themselves and honoring our families," he said. "One of the themes of this film is family, how we're all connected, and I think that's what makes these stories work."
In pursuit of that goal, Frybread Face and Me was guided by its matriarch, both in real life and on the screen. "I think who really eased us was Grandma, Sarah Natani," Luther told Mashable. "Whenever she was on set, she brought something that was so special. She's like our own grandmother: We respect and honor her and protect her."
Grandma never once renounced Benny, either for his interests or his lack of knowledge, inviting him to join in her traditionally gender-aligned work. She made frequent reminder of Fry's beauty in response to an unspoken insecurity, and they shared a strength as they communicated in their own language and participated in childlike bouts of make-believe. And, as viewers come to discover, she was the one who coaxed out Benny's first infant laugh — an important event in a Navajo child's life honored by a salt-of-the-earth ceremony, something that Benny later gets to participate in for his own cousin.
Emotional catharsis is met with emotional rebirth.
In the end, Benny is more settled into the complicated identity he's been somewhat forced into. He and Fry discover a boombox in Uncle Marvin's shed, pop in a tape, and dance with joyful ecstasy alongside the family's sheep on rocky outcroppings. Silhouetted by the setting sun, each don one of Grandma's headscarves and a flowing skirt, proudly Nicks-inspired.
When his sidelined mother finally returns to her own mother's home to retrieve her son, alone, Benny struggles to leave the ground where this new version was sowed. But it's time for him to take these lessons into his other life, his grandmother says. Left behind are tokens of his summer on the reservation and the details of a preteen life: complicated emotions, his Fleetwood Mac shirt, and the Visitor's Fork.
