Of all the documentaries at the Sundance film festival this year, perhaps none is as timely as Free Leonard Peltier, Jesse Short Bull and David France’s film on the Indigenous activist imprisoned for nearly half a century.
Peltier, now 80 years old, is serving consecutive life sentences for the killing of two FBI agents during a shootout at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975, though he has maintained his innocence. Activists, celebrities and liberation advocates such as Nelson Mandela have called for his release for decades, citing railroaded justice and evidence of prosecutorial misconduct; the FBI and law enforcement, meanwhile, have campaigned vociferously against any commutation of his sentence.
