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‘We’re really funny people’: Native American director Erica Tremblay on Lily Gladstone, laughter for survival and breaking Hollywood

The film-maker talks about her friendship with her debut feature’s star, and why the industry has woken up to her culture’s storytelling

Three decades on, she has woven this enduring crisis into an affecting and quirkily funny debut feature film, Fancy Dance, which does not dwell on the horror so much as on the strength and ingenuity it takes for a community to survive it. It stars Lily Gladstone, Oscar-nominated for Killers of the Flower Moon, who gives a fine performance as Jax, an inscrutable lesbian hustler, who has unofficially adopted her 13-year-old niece, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), after the disappearance of her sister. Tremblay, who is now in her early 40s, is speaking over video link from upstate New York, where she lives on the original lands of the Seneca Cayuga Nation, before they were booted out and spread across North America.

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