Erica Tremblay’s debut feature Fancy Dance enjoyed a fortuitous journey to completion: She worked on the script in the prestigious Sundance Development Labs; she lined up financiers to fund the project; and it stars Lily Gladstone, now the lead in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Tremblay, a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, watched the film premiere at the Sundance Film Festival’s biggest theater on a Friday night last January and read the rave reviews that followed.
A year later, however, Fancy Dance is still waiting for a distributor to take it to theaters. “We had folks saying, ‘We love this film. We really love you, Erica. We want to figure out how to work with you, but this just isn’t for us at this time,’” said Tremblay. “There’s a lot at play with the indie film market right now. There’s just been a lot of tumult, but it was a very weird reckoning to go from, OK, we’ve done everything we’ve been given to do to create a successful independent film, and now what do you do when there’s no viable pathway to an audience?”
